Does A Low Quality Post With Pagerank Merit Deleting?

[crazymikesapps1]

Hello,

We are cleaning up our low quality content on our website and we are struggling with the idea of deleting blog posts that have a pagerank of 1 or above, but pull in little to no views on the website.

My research seems to indicate that low quality content in terms of pageviews is possibly a negative for our website as a whole.

My dilemma, to delete the pages that hold rank or keep them?

thank you

Mike

[SebastianDyer]

My advise would be to remove or improve anything of low quality, even if it has a good page rank/page authority. With search optimisation, I always think about the brand first and holding content of a low quality on your website will not help you in the future. Be sure to always think about content that will captivate, inform and provide value to your audience first.

Perhaps consider improving the content instead of deleting? And if you do delete it, redirect the URL to the most relevant blog post on your website and you'll keep some of that page's authority.

[Chris.Menke]

Mike,

Certainly, PR isn't the metric to go by in this! PR isn't necessarily the ideal indicator of quality. Go by the actual things that indicate it, like whether or not the page is getting  any traffic from search, any referral traffic, whether or not visitors are clicking through to it from other pages on your site, whether they're spending any time on the page, whether it fits with your brand message and if not whether it can be revised to do so--those kind of things.  Even a PR of nul or 0 isn't an indication that something needs to be deleted.

[crazymikesapps1]

Okay, here is the problem.

We are a 4 year old blog, at one time we had a pagerank of 5. Suffering a manual action, Penguin and Panda we have been on the straight and narrow since 2 years ago. But, are just now realizing we still have problems.

We have 3,000 blog posts, my best guess is 1,500+ should be deleted because of the low quality of the content and the fact that we write and make much higher quality videos than we did before, a stark difference.

I wanted to hold onto pagerank pages for internal linking. I read an article and discovered that pages with pagerank can pass juice when noindex follow is attributed to them. So my strategy is delete anything that does not merit fixing, anything with pagerank that should be deleted, noindex follow until we can fix it?

What are your thoughts?

thank you

Mike

[crazymikesapps1]

Thank you, we are now doing just that, but in the first 2 to 3 years of our 4 year old blog we ran things, well poorly at best.

[Chris.Menke]

If you think it's low quality based on your standards and its not adding any value to the rest of your site or visitors, it's likely fair game for deletion.  From the sound of it, any PR those pages have isn't going toward helping any other pages, so again, I wouldn't put much weight on the PR factor as you make your decisions.

[crazymikesapps1]

Okay, thank you very much.

[crazymikesapps1]

Chris,

One last question. Some of our low quality content is has got great quality video and I want to salvage these posts.

Am I right to put them as noindex follow to remove any potential penalties from Google for poor quality content?

thank you

[Chris.Menke]

Maybe you could get the videos transcribed (if they're transcriptionable) and add that content to the page.  If you're getting search traffic to the page or to the video on youtube, I don't think I would worry about it. If not, you could put the video on a new url with new meta data and a couple new sentences--or the transcription-- and just let it ride until you can do more with it.

[crazymikesapps1]

thank you, time to clean house in a meticulous manner