Remove poor performing pages, or leave for google?

[Rj-Media]

Hi - we have a few old pages on our site which were created for SEO purposes a long time ago. They are pretty poor pages and we are rewriting them. However some are no longer relevant. We score "F" on those pages and I imagine google won't like them.

Should we delete the page and redirect nicely to the home page, or leave the page there, but remove it from our site?

What is best practice for removing old content?

Many thanks

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

Simple rule, if they haven't had any organic traffic for the last x months than you probably want to remove them as the long tail traffic there is also to low to put up the effort there of having them.

[webmethod]

+1 what Martijn says.

Even though the pages have no traffic, Google may still be crawling them if they have links so there may still be some equity in keeping them. If this is a concern you can redirect them to the most relevant (quality) page on your site. If it's only a few pages this is fine but any more than a few they might come up as "soft 404s" in Google WMT.

You can check if Google is crawling the pages by checking your web logs. That said, if the content is of no value and they don't have any decent links then I would just delete them and move on.

Regards,

George