With Panda 4.1 rolled out over the past month or so, more people have more Panda questions.
Typically, Panda is about low quality content and not useful pages on your site. So Marie Hayes asked Google's John Mueller in a Google+ hangout if one should remove old blog posts that rarely get read to help reverse a Panda penalty. The question was:
If a site has thousands of old blog posts that rarely get read, could this impact them negatively in the eyes of Panda? Should we be noindexing old blog posts?
The answer was not as straight forward, it depends.
John answered:
This is, I guess, a tricky topic because to some extent, it makes sense to keep an old archive of things. But on the other hand, if you're looking at these old blog posts and you say these are really low quality posts, then it might be worth cleaning that up. But in general, our quality algorithms do look at a site overall so we try to look at everything across the site. And if there are parts that aren't really relevant, that are kind of older, and kind of there for a reason but not really the primary reason for your site, then that's something we try to take into account as well.So just because you have these old blog posts where maybe you were doing a news announcement from 2001 and that's still on your site, that's not something I'd necessarily noindex just to clean things up. But sometimes it might also be that these old blog posts are really low quality and kind of bad, then that's something you would take action on. So just because they're older doesn't necessarily mean that they're good or bad in any specific way.
Here is the video of the Q&A starting at 54 minutes and 5 seconds into the hangout:
Of course, with this site looking like it was hit by Panda, it makes me wonder if I should delete some stuff. :)
Forum discussion at Google+.
