Kill, pimp or cut loose? Ideas for a legacy ECommerce blog

[webmethod]

Hi,

I'm looking to revamp the fortunes of an ailing Fashion ECommerce blog, which once had an impact on SEO for the site which it linked to but now has fallen by the wayside.

Blog sits here: www.mydomain.com/blog and links to products and categories on the ECommerce site www.mydomain.com.

The blog has about 2000 posts on it written over the past 5 years, which are almost all rewritten content about existing stories, events or embedded youtube videos related to fashion on the Web. None of the blog topics are unique, but the posts have been rewritten well and in an entertaining way - i.e. it's not just a copy and paste.

The blog is written on an old, proprietary platform and only has basic Social sharing. You can't comment on posts, or see "most popular" posts or tag clouds etc. It is optimised for SEO though, with fashion category tags, date archives and friendly URLs.

The company badly needs a shot in the arm for its content marketing efforts - so we're looking into the creation of infographics and other types of high quality, sharable content with an outreach effort. Ideally I want this content to be hosted on the Ecommerce site, but am faced with a few options which I'd appreciate the community's view on:

How I should handle the mix of the legacy content on /blog and the addition of new, "high quality" content?

1. (Pimp v1) Leave the /blog exactly as is and add the new, high quality content as new posts to it. Invest in pimping the /blog UI so that it has features such as commenting/tag clouds etc. They could migrate the blog to Wordpress, but leave it on the same URL.
2. (Cut loose) Leave the /blog alone, and start afresh with a new Wordpress blog for the new, high quality content. e.g. /News or news.mydomain.com. The old blog posts probably aren't worth bothering about, but it might be risky to delete them as there are a lot and are better off with them than without.
3. (Pimp v2) Set up a new Wordpress blog (e.g. /News or news.mydomain.com) for the new content and move the old /blog content to it. 301 the old /blog posts to the new location. The depth of old content that exists will add weight to the new content from a user's perspective, but will seem sparse if published on its own. Not sure why I would do this, but it's an option...
4. (Kill) Kill the old /blog content, start a new one for the new, high quality content.
5. Maybe there's another option I haven't considered.

Thanks in advance,

George

[EGOL]

5)  Maybe there's another option I haven't considered.

Here's how I determine the value of my blogs...

A) how many visitors do they pull in (these generate ad income)

B) how many of those visitors are bouncing

C) how many of those visitors buy something

D) how much social action and linklove is being generated

If you ask those questions about your existing blog you might have a better perspective on killing, pimping or cutting loose.   You might also discover what is working on that blog and use that as guide to creating more of what has worked in the past.  In addition, if you find dead wood on the blog you know what to cut loose and what to avoid doing going forward.  The analytics of the old blog can inform your future path.

[webmethod]

In the interests of closing off the question, I've decided to keep the existing content on the same URLs and refresh the UI so it provides a better platform for hosting the high quality content.

My rationale is that I did find backlinks pointing to some of the content which would be a shame to lose, and setting up so many 301s to a new location did not seem like a good use of time.