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The ONLY last thing I would add.

I'm sure you will notice a lot of eCommerce websites will keep products that they don't sell anymore, and just keep them as "sold out". People still hit those products and land on those pages.

Check and see how often people are hitting these products. If some of these pages have some juice left, it might be worth recreating a page in its place for a product that isn't being sold anymore and up sell for something you are selling. Or as Ricky said above me, 301 them.

Don't just prune everything at once. Slow and steady wins the race. Make sure you know what you are cutting before you cut it.

"I don't trust having Google do stuff for me that I could do myself, because plenty of times Google says how they are gonna do things and then change their mind without tellin' anybody." -EGOL

That may be one of the best industry quotes I have ever read....

I don't want to speak for EGOL here, but I don't think he is suggesting CUT everything. What I got from his post was pull what's worthless and redirect (or as you say consolidate) to whats worthwhile.

The webmaster before me was writing articles with a Spinner. At least I believe he was, so we end up with a Title and then 30 WP Tags. Of the 30 keywords maybe 5 will be tagged to 5 other posts, 5 will be tagged in at least one other post, 2 will be branded and the rest are 1 off keywords that are very random and are almost partial sentences.

For example we have 27 articles, and 440 tags.... that should give you some insight as to the website I'm trying to clean up....

As much as I wish that these pages were not a problem, given the fact that I could probably write a blogella (a short story blog) about just how messy this website I inherited actually is, I am inclined to think that they are doing more harm then they are helping. Our numbers are staggering,

We have 660 indexed pages, As you can see 440 of them are from wordpress tags.

From our links we have 145 different root domains that account for 11,000 inbound links

We have something like 18K internal links.

Things are not good over here.

Almost none of the pages have meta tags, alt tags, proper h1, h2, h3 etc,

Good Morning!

I would suggest taking a look at the Moz post on On-page Ranking Factors, in particular roughly at the bottom of the page there is a portion titled "An Ideally Optimized Webpage" which is almost a TLDR of the entire article and in my opinion spells out the structure of a perfect internal linking scheme very well.

I personally think it is natural that some of your pages may overlap what your homepage is optimized for. Obviously the more focused your homepage is, the better, but I try and make my homepage as specific as I can while still allowing me wiggle room to expand on the topic throughout the website. For some reason I always imagine the Taxonomy trees from my old Biology classes.

On another note a lot of Homepages will integrate a blog feed so that their content is continuously changing. Google is smart, and is always learning. I personally think we are slowly moving away from the days of designing/writing FOR Google. I try and organize everything in a way that my dad would understand. If he can figure out what my website is about, or how to get around, Google can.

(keep in mind with my previous statement, we still have to play by Googles rules and Best Practice for SEO, but just my own thoughts)

Hope that helps a little!