"Turning off" content to a site

[ThridHour]

One site I manage has a lot of low quality content. We are in the process of improving the overall site content but we have "turned off" a large portion of our content by setting 2/3 of the posts to draft. Has anyone done this before or had experience with doing something similar?

This quote from Bruce Clay comes to mind:

“Where a lot of people don’t understand content factoring to this is having 100 great pages and 100 terrible pages—they average, when the quality being viewed is your website,” he explained. “So, it isn’t enough to have 100 great pages if you still have 100 terrible ones, and if you add another 100 great pages, you still have the 100 terrible ones dragging down your average. In some cases we have found that it’s much better, to improve your ranking, to actually remove or rewrite the terrible ones than add more good ones.”

What are your thoughts? Thanks

[EGOL]

In some cases we have found that it’s much better, to improve your ranking, to actually remove or rewrite the terrible ones than add more good ones.

This sounds like a site that has been hit by a panda problem.   One of my sites had a lot of content republished from .gov and .edu domains -- mostly done at their request.  This was duplicate content and the rankings of this site dropped across the domain on a panda date.  We did noindex/follow on those pages and deleted some.  Rankings came back within a few weeks.

For the past two weeks are improving the content of a website that we usually do not work on.  It is ranking below its potential so we are writing detailed product descriptions for lots of pages that were not much better than cookie cutter pages.  This work will take a few months.

So, although I don't know if what Bruce Clay is saying is correct....  that is where I am betting my money.

[vmialik]

This post is deleted!

[vmialik]

Great advice EGOL, in our post-panda world!

On that note this should help:

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/blog/content/content-re-packaging-101/

http://www.jenniferslegg.com/2012/06/27/when-to-rewrite-older-content-instead-of-creating-new-linking/

http://idealware.org/blog/deciding-fate-outdated-content-update-redirect-or-rewrite