Hi, I am about to change the content of one of my websites completely. It has about 100 unique articles that are awfully bad. I intend to do some research again and hire someone to write new articles about new topics. The problem or issue am I facing is that I rank #1 (or more recently #3 for whatever reason) for my main keyword. I would like to know if such a drastic change could affect the search engine rankings. I don't have any particular experience with this, that's why I am asking for your experiences. Although opinions are always welcome, I would rather like to hear if someone has done this before. Thanks in advance.
Expect a hiccup in your SERPS when the change is made. Might be a good idea to make some 301 redirects for your really valuable pages.
That's why I am expecting as well and it doesn't really sound to good to me. I just read all of my articles again after two years and some really don't provide any useful information. The articles do not contain fillers, instead they are fillers in some cases...
I quite often improve and substantially rewrite pages that were originally 'fillers' (without changing the URL) even if they already rank well - so far I have rarely noticed a drop in ranking, and more often an improvement. I never changed 100 all at once though.
Well, I don't probably intend to remove all of the 100 articles. I'd rather just want to take out the articles that are fillers and stuffed with keywords. I read one of those articles and it doesn't make any sense or provide any value to the reader. It's crap to sum it up. Maybe I can find an attractive article subject with the same keyword for some of the articles though. Let's see. So far, thanks for the input guys.
That will certainly affect youyr SERPs - I would just use different URLs for the new articles and leave the old ones...