Old SEO keyword "articles", are they hurting rankings?

[Loganshark]

Hello,

About two years ago, the company I work for hired an SEO firm to improve organic rankings on our site.  The SEO company's primary method for doing this was producing "articles" that are not really articles but keyword stuffed pages with lots of hidden, internal links to other legitimate pages on our site.

Examples:

http://www.creamright.com/Isi-Chargers-articles.html

http://www.creamright.com/How-To-Make-Whipped-Cream-article.html

http://www.creamright.com/Cream-Whipper-articles.html

Obviously, this strategy wasn't greatly successful and we cancelled our work with the firm.  However, we still have all of the "articles" on the site (about 50-60 pages total) and each page is navigable from the html and XML sitemaps.  Additionally, the SEO firm we used built a lot of useless links to these pages from BS directory sites which are all still active.

The question I have is whether we should remove these "article" pages or should leave them alone?  Although I'm sure they aren't helping any of our SEO efforts, could deleting the pages after two years negatively impact our search rankings?

Thanks in advance for any help on this,

Doug M.

[TellThemEverything]

Ouch, they are nasty. Hiding the links like that is dangerous - super easy to detect and can be viewed as deceptive. I would leave the articles, but at the very least remove the CSS that hides the links. I would probably remove all the links in the article.

Of course, if the articles are pure junk (I'm not sure) then get some nice ones written and replace them.

[maxkennerly]

If they're not helping, and have no links to them, then kill them or, better yet, replace them with better content. The search engines are increasingly targeting low-value content, and there's a chance they'll view you as operating a content farm to some extent and lower your ranking accordingly.

Probably most bang for your buck is to kill the worst half of them and then improve the best half.

[KeriMorgret]

I see that the ISI Chargers article is also out there on the web in a couple of other places, including this article directory at http://www.articlefield.com/7473/isi-chargers/.

I agree with James Shaw that you should remove the CSS that hides the links, and remove the links that just don't make sense (which may be all of them).

Do you use Google Webmaster Tools? If so, log in there and see if Google has any messages for you about your site. On the plus side, at least it's not malware, and it's something that you can easily fix.

[KeriMorgret]

Just curious what your company ended up doing about this, and if you've seen any impact yet if you have made changes.

[Loganshark]

We haven't totally solved this problem yet.  We removed the CSS that was hiding the links but otherwise left everything the same.  Only a few of the pages shows up in the first 50 Google results for its targeted keyword and none of the pages receives very much traffic. We are still considering whether it would be better to kill the pages and 301 redirect to something more relevant, or simply noindex the pages and leave them alone.

Our biggest concern is that many of these pages have a lot of links coming to them, although most of them are very low quality links.  I think are best approach is going to be trying to improve the pages that do have some rankings and eliminating the rest of the pages with 301 redirect.