A little help with poor quality content

[Apex]

I have been away from online business for two years because I had an offline job that paid me well and I didn't need an online business. I have finished that job and I would like to resume my online business.

I have a Spanish technology website. The domain was registered in 2015 and has an average of 130 daily visits and 30€ of monthly income.

I want to reactivate this project, but for that I have a question about the content. It has 450 post and most are news and reviews. This type of content has virtually no visits and no profits, so I was considering eliminating them and leaving the 10 or 20 posts that do generate profits and visits.

Will it be harmful if I simply delete them? There is also the problem that there are so many posts to do so many 301 redirects, so I would probably eliminate them leaving the 404 error.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'm assuming you're talking about SEO. This is called content pruning and it's something a bunch of us discussed in the past here.

No, it's not harmful to delete posts and in many cases it can be beneficial (if they suck). The benefits including less index bloat, less crap pages sucking up your page rank juice, and a higher quality score in terms of Panda.

A post may not get traffic or links but can still be considered quality by the algorithm. It may be low word count and can still be considered quality if it matches the intent of the query it's optimized for.

I would decide first: What are my goals and vision for this site, Google be damned? I'd probably cut out the news stuff because I'd focus entirely on evergreen topics. I'm not big into time-sensitive searches.

So then I'd look at those posts and see which ones had traffic and links. Anything that did, I'd either 301 it to a related post I intended on keeping or I'd create an evergreen post similar to the topic as the target of the redirect.

But before I did anything I'd have a sit down and really figure out exactly what I want this site to look like, the angle of attack, what the categories will be, how I want it to grow, etc. That way you won't be doing this again in the future.

 

[Apex]

I'm assuming you're talking about SEO.

Yes, I mean the impact this would have on SEO.

I'd probably cut out the news stuff because I'd focus entirely on evergreen topics.

Most of the site's content is news and reviews of products that in some cases are not even for sale anymore. My intention is to delete them, but there are two or three hundred posts of this type.

Wouldn't it be many 301 redirects in the .htaccess file? Or if they had no visits, can I simply remove them and lead to a 404 error?

This is called content pruning and it's something a bunch of us discussed in the past here.

I'm going to read this thread, thanks for notifying me of its existence.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Wouldn't it be many 301 redirects in the .htaccess file?

Sure, you don't want to bloat out your .htaccess file with unimportant stuff. You could store PHP redirects in your database. They're a tad slower but who cares since these don't get traffic.

But then again, if they aren't worth saving, they aren't worth 301-ing most of the time, especially if you have to go through the trouble of creating a new relevant content target to aim them at.

 

[Diaz]

I've worked with sites with up to 3-4 thousand htaccess redirects and there was no visible impact on site load times.

Also, if you have no relevant content to redirect your posts to, and you won't be creating more related up-to-date or evergreen content, I would use a 410 instead of redirecting everything to the homepage.

Unless any of that posts has backlinks of course.