Is this the best way to get rid of low quality content?

[BrianYork-AIM]

Hi there, after getting hit by the Panda bear (30% loss in traffic) I've been researching ways to get rid of low quality content.  From what I could find the best advise seemed to be a recommendation to use google analytics to find your worst performing pages (go to traffic sources - google organic - view by landing page).  Any page that hasn't been viewed more than 100 times in 18 months should be a candidate for a deletion. Out of over 5000 pages and using this report we identified over 3000 low quality pages which I've begun exporting to excel for further examination.

However, starting with the worst pages (according to analytics) I'm noticing some of our most popular pages are showing up here.  For example: /countries/Panama is showing up as zero views but the correct version (with the end slash) countries/Panama/ is showing up as having over 600 views.  I'm not sure how google even found the former version of the link but I'm even less sure how to proceed now (the webmaster was going to put a no-follow on any crap pages but this is now making him nervous about the whole process).

Some advise on how to proceed from here would be fantastico and danke

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[zharriet]

Great question.

I'd appreciate a pro seo opinion on this, but here's what I am doing on our website.

To Rel Canonical or 301? That is the question for  the /countries/Panama to countries/Panama/ and the other examples like that.

On the other pages, what about moving the best part of the content from a low view page to a similar content higher view page and then 301 the old page to the better page?

[john4math]

rel=canonical is more for when there are parameters on your URLs that you can't really do anything about.  When you know one URL is being served, but should be another, you should use a 301 redirect.  So in this case, you should pick which URL you like better, either with or without the trailing slash, and redirect one to the other.  Google treats both of these as two completely separate pages, which is why you're seeing views on one and not the other.  If you can't configure the redirect, then you could resort to rel=canonical.

If you have pages with similar content but not a lot of views, then 301 redirecting that page to another page with more views would be fine.  That'll pass it's pagerank along, and good for people who find that original URL later, because they'll go to an actual page instead of your 404 page.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi! I've asked for another associate with more Panda experience than I to come in and comment on this question.

Byork, knowing a little more about your trailing slash issue could help out. Do you have trailing slash redirects in place for all of your pages? Were they put in at a particular time, where you might be able to look at data from just after that date?

If the trailing slashes are in place correctly and always have been, and it's just some weird artifact of GA that is causing these pages to show up with 0 visits, can you ignore those pages that don't have the trailing slash and focus just on the metrics for those with the trailing slash?