Can Low-Quality Content Hurt Your High-Quality Content?

Ever since Google’s Panda, SEOs have had a continuous debate: Can low-quality pages of the site negatively impact high-quality content and drag their rankings down?

Most websites have a bunch of older, thin, outdated content that may have no positive signals (in terms of backlinks and traffic). Can those pages be holding your key pages down and prevent them from ranking higher?

How do we identify those lower quality pages? And how can we tell if they have any impact on the rest of your site?

Jim Boykin, CEO of Internet Marketing Ninjas, and Ann Smarty, IMN’s analyst, are discussing the issue of low-quality pages and outdated content and what kind of an impact those may have on your site:

This is the tweet that have brought this topic back into our attention:

To give you some context, the initial question was about a multi-lingual site which had one strong version (e.g. English version) and other language versions which were not necessarily that powerful (in terms of links and traffic).

So the question was whether this may negatively impact their successful section. And John Mueller’s response was:

For some things, we look at site quality *overall*. So, if you have significant portions that are low quality, then that can drag down your original, higher quality content too

This is an interesting response because for years Google denied the so called “Site Authority” metric claiming all their signals were on the page level.

Yet, ever since Panda we’ve seen this site authority in action: If the site had a huge proportion of made-for-SEO keyword-stuffed content that was created for Google, and a small percentage of really useful and valuable content, that good content would tank in Google as well.

And the cure for that was removing that low-quality content, or move it to a subdomain, leaving only really useful content with great signals.

If your site is slowly losing organic traffic, this is something to look out for as well: Maybe it is time that you clean your site to remove old and outdated pages that have no good signals. This may be your recovery.

If you have trouble identifying that low-quality content and deciding on the best course of action, reach out! We may be able to help!