Deleting low quality content

[Yuji_m]

Hi there. I have a question about deleting low quality content pages hopefully anyone could share your feedback on.

We have a b2c ecom store and Product Pages are our target LDPs from search. We've built many information pages that are related to different products in the long past that are linked to related product pages.

Problem is many of them lack so-called quality content in terms of volume and quality and they aren't helping. Especially since early this year, organic traffic started declining after having peaked in Feb.

So I'm considering deleting those we and Moz consider low quality that are not receiving search traffic.

Firstly, is that a good idea? Secondly, how should I go about it? Just delete them and put a redirect so that deleted pages will point to related pages or even homepage?

Looking forward to any expert input.
-Yuji

[effectdigital]

This is usually speaking **not the right mind set **to succeed.

When Google says (through decreasing ranking positions) that you haven't put in enough effort, usually deleting a poor attempt garners no favour in the ranking results. Think about it. Google are saying "you don't have enough quality content" and your answer is to delete content, thus having less than before. Does that seem like a genuine attempt to comply with the increasing stringency of Google's guidelines?

Deleting stuff is the easy way out. Think about it as if you wrote an essay in College and Google were the examiner. They Give you a D- for your essay and mark certain areas of your work as needing improvement. If you deleted those paragraphs, did nothing else and re-submitted the essay would you honestly expect a better grade?

Google want to see effort, unique content, value-add for end users. _Real _hard graft.

If you have high volumes of pages which are identical other than one tiny tab of information or a variable price, then maybe streamlining your architecture by removing pages is the answer. If most of the pages are unique in function (e.g: factually different products, not just parameter-based URL variants etc) then it's more a comment on the lack of invested effort and you must tackle your mindset if you want to rank.

N.B: By effort I don't mean your personal effort. I could also be alluding to the fact that budget was too low when producing content. I'm describing the site - not you personally!

[Yuji_m]

Thanks a lot for your feedback. It was helpful. I think we may need to remove pages leaving only unique ones and update their content to be more valuable. Thanks!

[effectdigital]

That's a really good idea! Cut down what you have to manage to the essentials and then spend more time on those pages. Make sure you do some kind of ranking or traffic audit against all the pages though. You don't want to delete the versions of each page which have some (even if it is small) SEO power. You want to target the ones which Google isn't using

[Yuji_m]

Thanks for your advice. Yes, we will definitely be careful deleting pages. Thanks a lot!