Dealing with low quality content

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Dealing with low quality content

teokolo

10:10 am on Apr 12, 2016 (gmt 0)

I have a site with low quality news section, updated daily, which receive low traffic from search engines (about 1% of total traffic). I'm wondering if it makes sense keeping it or moving out of the website.
Right now the website has 1200 medium-high quality articles and 1000 low quality news. News are not scraped, it's original content but a high percentage of them is duplicated (very similar content in different news), most of the news are promotional, no real value in them. They're not real news actually.

What would you do?
1) Completely drop the news section, 301 redirect only articles with traffic.
2) Move the news section to another domain and 301 redirect.
3) Merge similar content. Improving articles does not make sense since most of the promotions have expired.
4) Other suggestions?

Wilburforce

11:03 am on Apr 12, 2016 (gmt 0)

most of the news are promotional, no real value in them. They're not real news actually

This appears to summarise what it adds to the user experience. What is/was the purpose of it?

If it does nothing for the site or the user, get rid of it.

teokolo

11:20 am on Apr 12, 2016 (gmt 0)

I guess the old webmaster wanted a regularly updated section, he started with real news, then he switched to promotional content.
In my opinion the website is better without this section than with a useless regularly updated one.

aristotle

12:12 pm on Apr 12, 2016 (gmt 0)

I agree that this news section should be eliminated from the site. But keep in mind that it's a major change to suddenly delete almost 50% of the pages on a site. So I suggest that you do it slowly and gradually. You might end up keeping a very small number of those pages if they're getting traffic or have backlinks. Also, gradually eliminating pages might also mean that you need to gradually change the navigation and internal linking structure as well.

martinibuster

1:27 pm on Apr 12, 2016 (gmt 0)

If a news section is useful to people then consider getting rid of the useless content and start it afresh as a current events/industry roundup blog. Use it to interact with influencers and get the site noticed by more people.

teokolo

5:07 pm on Apr 12, 2016 (gmt 0)

Thank you for your advice.

Do you think it's better simply gradually removing those articles, or could be better setting NOINDEX first and then deleting once they're out of the index?

martinibuster

5:39 pm on Apr 12, 2016 (gmt 0)

I don't recall having removed an entire section of content, at least not to any site of mine that mattered to me. So do take note that I'm not speaking out of experience, but simply sharing my opinion.

I don't believe it'll cause a negative outcome to remove a large section of a site. Google ranks pages not websites. The only possible effect I can think of is that the PageRank distribution and Googlebot crawling will be focused and more optimized toward the pages that matter- and that's a good thing, exactly what most people would want.

My opinion is that there are only upsides, and no downside to it at all. I would be grateful to anyone who wants to share a solid reason why the OP should be reluctant to remove low quality pages.