When to delete low quality content

[nicole.healthline]

If 75% of a site is poor quality, but still accounts for 35% of the traffic to the site, should the content be 404ed? Or, would it be better to move it to a subdomain and set up 301 re-directs? This site was greatly affected by Panda.

[EGOL]

How about upgrading the content?

Look at your analytics.  Identify the pages there that are getting the most traffic.  Start with them and continue.

[Dan-Petrovic]

Good point. I would go further into exploring which pages / phrases have been cut most and work out any common elements of all that have been affected and define a plan of attack. If you have more than 100 articles it would take some time before it's all fixed. It's all about prioritising.

A good place to take a peek at is Google Webmaster Tools which shows search trends and CTR data as well.

[EGOL]

I am not saying this very loudly... but I sometimes toss out a little ditty of content to see if it pulls any traffic and to see where it positions in the SERPs.   I use these as "scouts" to identify easy targets.  If it works then I know that a larger investment in content will pay off.

[nicole.healthline]

Thank you for the reply. I should add that this 75% of the content is an application (i.e. it is all the same). So the traffic is about the same on all of the pages. We need to choose between 404-ing the content or putting it on a subdomain. Do you know if having thin content on a subdomain will affect the original domain? I've been searching for a while, but can't seem to find anything concrete about this. Thanks!