I'm looking to clean up one of my sites and get rid of some of the skimpy posts from years ago and I'm wondering how I should go about this without it having a negative impact on the site in regards to SEO. There will probably be around 300 or so posts getting deleted. Should I just send them all to the trash and go to a 404 page, direct them to the homepage, or what? I'm not an SEO expert or anything like that, just a blogger, but I want to do what's best, obviously. Any suggestions?
You could use the Levenshtein Distance algorithm if you use wordpress for example with this plugin, is a way to calculate how similar two words are to one another. The plugin here. http://pro.virante.com/404/predictive404.txt for info about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance
If you don't want to lose any SEO benefit just redirect all the pages to some relevant page of your website (using 301 redirection).
It's not a significant percentage of your site, so it shouldn't be detrimental to SEO, however, I'd look at the performance of each individual pages, and start by deleting the non performing pages first. Some of the pages should be getting some traffic so it would be a waste just to delete them. I'd look at improving the content of these pages.
I thought of this since I would hate to delete any content from the site, but doing so would mean less time to update the site. When things are flowing normally, the site is updated with around 10 posts a day. It's a competitive market. If I had to go back and rewrite the content that's skimpy, or somewhat unrelated to majority of the content on the site, it would mean less updates, which boils down to less traffic, meaning less revenue. I know I may lose some traffic by deleting the posts, however, I feel it will just be a tiny fraction, and that if I get rid of the content, it may boost the overall SERP performance of other pages that have more content and is better written. The site recently took a dive in the search results, and I think some of this skimpy and unrelated (i.e. post about a mens coat on a site about mostly mens gloves - just cause we thought the coat would look good with a pair of gloves previously posted) may have something to do with it. I guess there could be an upside and downside to however you look at it. Yes, all of them. However, as I said to the other poster above, a lot of the posts have dropped in the search results since the Panda update and I'm thinking skimpy and unrelated content that was posted when the site was first started may have something to do with that. The idea is, if we delete this content, it will boost the performance of other pages.
In that case I'd remove the content, making sure that I wasn't removing pages that were performing well. I'd also do this gradually instead of all in one go. Once the deleted pages have been fully deindexed, I'd use the content for article marketing purposes.
Sounds like a great idea, but majority of the articles on the site are 100 words or less. The skimpy ones are probably around 40 words. The site is basically a buyers guide with quick descriptions about products and where they're available. So, I highly doubt article sites would accept them. It was a good idea though haha. One may argue that my site was hit by Panda due to the short articles. However, there are a list of other sites in the same niche that have articles just as long or slightly shorter that have had no problems, so I don't believe it has anything to do with lack of content. I think some of it is just to short, being that quite a few articles from the past have no more then 2-3 sentences with an outbound link.
There is nothing wrong with publishing shorter articles, but if your entire site lacks content, then you have thin content, and then it becomes an issue. Users aren't going to stick around if all they see is product descriptions or whatever.
Actually, for the sake of conversation, that's not entirely true. I could list a slew of websites that have thin content that's basically no more then product descriptions that get millions of pageviews on a daily basis, two of them being Hypebeast.com and Uncrate.com, sites I visit myself. Get an estimate for their traffic, take a look at the amount of friends they have on a Facebook fan page and on Twitter, see how many people Retweet, +1 and Share their articles. The viewers hang around and they rank well in the search results. Like I said, I'm not SEO expert, but I do know that a site with short articles can do extremely well. The proof is in the pudding. That's not to say though that i don't think that if you took these same articles and fluffed them up a bit, they wouldn't rank better on a different site. My niche is a different then the sites listed above, but the same concept pretty much.