Removing old content

[netzkern_AG]

Ahoy!

Variously I have heard the opinion that content which does not generate regular search traffic (let's ballpark it at >10 views in any given month) should be noindexed or even removed. Allegedly this would improve the overall quality of the site, rankings and traffic.

I remain doubtful. What would you do if the interest in a given matter goes down over time for any (most) given topics of your content and is replaced by "newer" specific interest?

Concrete example:

I have a website about (book) reviews. Naturally, there will always be new books; old books are not in the media as much and "forgotten". Nevertheless, the reviews (all unique, based on really having read the books, no trace of the standard back cover copy) are obviously still there. Personally I feel that they do not really lose any value - they are still reviews of that one book, even though it is not the most recent one.

So, what would you do: Deindex "older" book reviews after a certain time? Even remove them completely? Just let them run?

I am looking forward to your opinions - and even your experience if you have done something like this!

Nico

[GlobeRunner]

When it comes to content on your site and Google Panda issues, you need to look at the site as a whole. Generally speaking, we want all of the content to be quality content. If there are book reviews that have plenty of content (as in there is a good amount of text on the page), then even if they are older books you'd want to keep those pages.

When it comes to Google Panda, which you're describing, we're more concerned about "thin content pages", not necessarily content that no one as viewed in a while. When it comes to identifying this content, though, I prefer to look at pages that haven't had any views for 6 months. Even if the page has had less than 10 views in any given month we'd still want to leave content that has had a few views in the past month.

I do believe that there is a use for older book reviews, so if the pages do have enough unique text on the page, then it would be worth it to leave those pages. You might need to look at your overall site structure, though, if you have a lot of pages then they might not be ranking well (or have a lot of page views) because of the site structure--and not necessarily because of the content.

[EGOL]

I have hundreds of books for sale on one of my websites and the product pages for these books get very few visitors per month.  However, each month we make about 75 sales from these pages (with some visitors buying several different books).  Think of it as 500 pages that each get 5 visitors per month with 3% of the visitors making a purchase.  These sales are really easy to service, just open the shopping cart page, print a label, slip a book or two into a mailer, slap on a label.  The inventory turns over about once a year and takes up very little space. We are not going to delete those pages.

These are not thin content pages.  We have a few hundred words of unique content per page plus standard information that includes, author, publisher, date, ISBN, etc.