Should I Remove This Subdirectory From Google?

[PedroAndJobu]

On my site, I have a subdirectory.

It posts articles from a bunch of websites that my readers are interested in & links back to all of those sites.  There is no original content in it.

There are over 1700 indexed pages in this subdirectory.  The rest of my site has about 500 (all original content).

The search engine traffic for this subdirectory only accounts for 3.9% of my sites overall visits.

Should I consider removing this subdirectory?  Could all the duplicate content be hurting the rankings of my legit pages?

What do you all think?

[Dan-Petrovic]

If it makes sense to have them there then leave it, however if you feel there has been a traffic drop then it may be worth investigating if it was these 1700 indexed articles that have caused it.

[Dr-Pete]

It's tough - I do think it boils down to the numbers. If you were talking about 1,700 pages and the rest of your site had 50K indexed pages, I'd probably say not to worry about it (unless, as @Dejan said, you experienced a traffic drop or other problems). When the rest of your site is 500 pages, though, I'd start to worry, especially with Panda updates hitting sites with too much copied content (even if legitimately syndicated).

The fact that your linking back does help (you're not trying to claim these are your articles), but if these pages, which are more than 75% of your index, only represent 4% of visits, I'd really start to question the usefulness and whether it's worth the potential SEO risk.

There might be a partial solution - you could NOINDEX a large chunk of the pages, but leave 50-100 of the articles, if those account for 90%+ of the traffic you're getting. Of course, that's going to take some analysis and is a bit trickier to implement, but it could let you keep most of that 3.9%.

I'd also see where that traffic is coming from - if it's 3.9% of total traffic, but only 0.9% of search traffic (mostly direct visits, bookmarks, etc.), then you've got even less to worry about if you de-index the whole subdirectory.

[PedroAndJobu]

Upon further review, it looks like I'm getting about 150-200 search visits to the articles within that subd a week...I'm gonna keep it up.

It's easy enough to figure out which posts are getting the most search traffic, but it is going to be crazy removing only the ones which do not get that traffic...

If I see a huge panda like drop off in search traffic, then I'll pull the trigger.  Until then, we will stick with it.

Thanks for the advice.