Domain Transition: Leaving low quality content behind

[dsbud]

We're in the initial stages of planning a domain transition / rebrand.

We're considering 301'ing our low and high(er) quality content split to two different domains. One for the low quality, one for our high. Best practices normally tell you to not split your content between between multiple domains. However, what if the majority of pages on your site are thin/outdated, and attract low volume/long tail? Does it make sense to bring that low quality/volume content over the new domain, when you know you'll never have the resources (nor would it make sense to) mass improve the quality of these pages? I'm concerned the quality of these pages are affecting our overall domain authority.

Some background on our site/business:

• Current site has 15,000+ pages.
• 98% of our site is a product directory of professional/enterprise business management software.
• While a small handful of our product pages have quality original long form content (maybe 50-100), most of the product pages are a combination of: thin, outdated, overly sales-y content provided directly from product developers, and/or catch only very low-volume/long tail organic traffic.
• 95% of our pages attract fewer than 20 visits/mo, 90% of our pages attract fewer than 10 visits/mo.
• We have a small business of about 10 employees. Most of which don't maintain our site.

It's unrealistic for us to genuinely improve the quality of that many pages. Nor does it make sense to improve most of these pages, as they'll attract only very low volume keywords.

Individually these low quality pages don't bring in many customers, but on aggregate they do. 70% of our organic conversions come from pages with less than 20 visits/mo.

A few questions:

1. Is this content negatively affecting our domain authority in any way? While I don't believe we've been hit with a penalty, Google knows that on average our pages aren't very helpful to many users, and I'm concerned that affects our ability to rank with pages that matter. None of the content was mass produced in any form of scraping efforts or anything nefarious like that.
2. Would there be any negative/positive affect to offloading these low quality/volume pages to a different domain during the rebrand?

[NoahKain]

Instead of sending low-quality pages to a different domain than your high-quality pages, I think it would make more sense and be more beneficial to 301 them all to the new domain, except you'd redirect those low-quality pages to either a similar, higher-quality page or to the home page of the website. I don't think there is much value in using two domains in this scenario. If you don't want the pages, they just shouldn't exist on the new domain and should be redirected to better content.

[dsbud]

Thanks, this is helpful. To answer the first question, do you think it's likely that the quantity/proportion of these lower quality pages are affecting our domain authority? Thus affecting the abiility of our high-quality content to rank better?

[NoahKain]

It might be affecting your domain authority, but I would be more worried about those pages negatively affecting your rankings if the large number of pages are creating a poor UX due to a complicated navigation structure or if users are having difficulty finding the content they want. Overall I would say a general rule of thumb should be: does this content serve a purpose and provide value to our visitors? If the answer is no, then I would 301 to a page that provides value. If it's yes, I would keep the page.