Hello all, I own a respectable and popular article directory that gets good rankings for the main index page as well as a large percentage of the individual article pages. I am speaking mainly about Google, but also a small portion of Yahoo. I have decided that I want to clean out the database of all old, unranked, poor quality, spammy articles...or maybe all articles completely and start over with a brand new database. If I decide to wipe the database clean and start over with all new articles, what would the effect be to my highly ranked main index page? It has a great deal of quality inbound, one-way backlinks and is, as I said, a respectable and well-managed directory. Any inbound links to the article pages have been created by the authors. This sounds rude and inconsiderate (but it's just business), I don't mind losing all rankings and content in my article pages this one time. I just don't want to lose my ranking for my main index page...that is what will get me the new articles that I need! I am not doing this just to clean out the database. My plan is to now only accept "extreme expertly written", quality and original articles. Would it be a better idea to delete the articles one at a time as I add the new articles? That would be almost impossible due to time constraints. I want to do this but I don't want to lose my years of SEO to my home page! Please help me!!! Respectfully, Allen Graves
It depends on a LOT of factors, remember those pages probably internally link to your homepage and pass on some type of Pagerank\SEO weight from internal factors. You might see a drop in search results by doing this, I would just be a "respectable" article website and accept you didn't properly moderated past articles and will start doing so in the future.
Yes, they are internally linked. I have always placed an emphasis on quality while moderating. But as I moderate more and more, I see which articles get the most traffic and I want to get rid of the ones that are not written in that manner. Then, I will only accept the ones that are written in that manner in the future. Tough dilemna...I really see a large jump in traffic and revenue if I do this...but at the same time, I may lose my top fold ranking for the top keyword in this industry! AL