Should I delete older posts on my site that are lower quality?

[ryj]

Hey guys! Thanks in advance for thinking through this with me. You're appreciated!

I have 350 pieces of Cornerstone Content that has been a large focus of mine over the last couple years. They're incredibly important to my business. That said, less experienced me did what I thought was best by hiring a freelance writer to create extra content to interlink them and add relevancy to the overall site.

Looking back through everything, I am starting to realize that this extra content, which now makes up 1/3 my site, is at about 65%-70% quality AND only gets a total of about 250 visitors per month combined -- for all 384 articles. Rather than spending the next 9 months and investing in a higher quality content creator to revamp them, I am seeing the next best option to remove them.

From a pros perspective, do you guys think removing these 384 lower quality articles is my best option and focusing my efforts on a better UX, faster site, and continual upgrading of the 350 pieces of Cornerstone Content?

I'm honestly at a point where I am ready to cut my losses, admit my mistakes, and swear to publish nothing but gold moving forward. I'd love to hear how you would approach this situation!

Thanks

[ryj]

Hi Chris, thanks so much for the answer and thoughts on what you would do!

I totally hear what you're saying about the keyword stuffing. As I look back over it, it seems like it would make a great drinking game. Every time you read "Wyoming" you have to take a drink! (Would be a VERY short game haha)

Awesome. Based on your feedback, I'm going to go back through and make sure each article is:

1. Not keyword stuffed.

2. Interlinked effectively and organically.

3. Cut any crazy confusing wording.

Thanks again Chris. I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to look this over and give your honest option. You rock!

[ChrisAshton]

Wow, so sorry about the slow reply here, things have been crazy the last couple of weeks!

Looking at a few of your blogs I see what you mean. They're not too bad but are probably a bit too keyword-stuff to keep as they are.

Having the keyword amongst the content isn't a problem (obviously!) but when it starts to feel unnatural, that's when you start turning users away. As an example, I had a look at this post and found the word Wyoming used 17 times in a fairly short post.

Paragraphs like this one really highlight the awkwardness:

From the moment you validate a business idea, to processing your business licensing requirements, incorporating in Wyoming, to finding the right financing, it takes up time, money, and effort.

I also noticed in that post that the first link points to the page you're already on!

Internal linking is important and for the most part appears to have been implemented quite well. If it were my website I'd be leaving the posts up but systematically working my way back through them to remove some of the keyword stuffing and fixing up any weird linking to make them read better.

As much as cutting them all and starting again would be technically correct, in the real world we need to make compromises like this to maintain existing rankings and income.

[ryj]

Thanks for the input Chris, I appreciate you taking the time to respond!

You hit the nail on the head for them being 'just ok'. No spam keywords or crazy re-directs. I would say that the readability isn't great and you can actually see the entire list here.

Engagement is horrible. The pages are indexed by Google, but get almost no traffic. When they do get traffic, the time on site is less than about 30 seconds.

As a note: If you check out the internal inking inside the articles on that list, its actually that which holds me back from removing the pages. I feel like the internal linking strategy is pretty decent and it may be cool to keep them. I'm just not sure it's worth keeping them on solely for that reason.

[ChrisAshton]

This is a tough one and a bit of a gamble either way I suppose. If the content was absolute rubbish (maybe horrible spelling and grammar or keyword-spammed) then the suggestion would be obvious - delete them and move on.

Being that it sounds like they're "ok" but just not up to your modern standards, the decision isn't quite so simple. Having them on your site isn't going to make it any slower unless they're adding redirects or something else to your site, the issue is whether or not their low quality is hurting you and it's tough to say without seeing them.

Very generally speaking, if they're free of errors, don't spam keywords or talk about dodgy subjects like online casinos or pharmaceuticals then you're probably better off leaving them there since they will be passing some relevance signals and they are bringing you traffic.

The one other thing I'd suggest checking is user engagement on those pages. Since Google is looking at this too, having an average session duration of 4 seconds for a 2,000 word post is a pretty clear red flag that whatever that page is about isn't worthy of being in their search results.