Time To Throw In The Towel?

[94501]

I have a website that has some good rank on competitive terms. Most of the organic search traffic goes to the homepage, but some generally newer and better constructed, more user-friendly sub pages get organic rank/traffic for a variety of different terms/subjects as well.

Then, I have about 8 pages that are older and suck. They fail in the SERPs and there's nothing much of interest from a user point of view. Rather than do the work to completely re-do these pages, I'm thinking of just 301ing them to the homepage. My hope is that this will help the homepages terms/rank which are similar to these pages subject & terms.

Do you think this will help the homepage and it's terms or merely end the existence of some old pages and sort of evaporate the link juice?

Is there some way that Google might see the site on the whole as being less relevant to their shared subject matter, if these pages go away?

Thanks!

[EGOL]

I rarely abandon pages. Instead I improve them. Before abandoning pages I would check to see if they have any external links and if they attract traffic from search. If they are useless pages then I would 301 redirect them. Will this help your SERPs? It might help slightly but it might not.

[94501]

About the only thing on these pages worth saving is their url. There's no content on them that is user relevant. The 8, altogether, have one link from another site. They get a total of about 60 visits a month... between all eight.They're old pages from some really bad seo articles that made little sense then and less now.

I have a couple of other pages I was thinking about doing this with, but also moving their text content to the homepage... to make the homepage a little deeper text-wise.

Any way that ditching pages around a shared subject could make Google think the whole thing is less relevant... even the surviving homepage?

It doesn't sound like you think much of the forwarding to the homepage thing for the link juice.

[EGOL]

The redirect value is one link from another website.