I do not think that simple removal of content is the best solution. This is similar to ignoring the problem in the hope that it can be resolved by itself. If you do not constantly work with website optimization, you can reach a point when need to delete the entire website but not just a portion of the content. Search engine optimization is not an event but a process.
As you know, Google does not disclose the details of its search algorithms, so we can only guess.
According to the Search Quality Raters Guideline of Google the website with medical content falls into the category Your Money Or Your Life: YMYL and must meet the requirements Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness: EAT. Here's what it tells us:
Some types of pages could potentially impact the future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users. We call such pages “Your Money or Your Life” pages, or YMYL. The following are examples of YMYL pages:
...● Medical information pages: webpages that provide advice or
information about health, drugs, specific diseases or conditions,
mental health, nutrition, etc.
And further:
Here are the most important factors to consider when selecting an
overall Page Quality rating:
● The Purpose of the Page
● Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness: This is an important
quality characteristic. Use your research on the additional factors
below to inform your rating.
● Main Content Quality and Amount: The rating should be based on the
landing page of the task URL.
● Website Information/information about who is responsible for the
Main Content: Find information about the website as well as the
creator of the Main Content.
● Website Reputation/reputation about who is responsible for the main
content: Links to help with reputation research will be provided.
● High E-A-T medical advice should be written or produced by people or
organizations with appropriate medical expertise or accreditation.
High E-A-T medical advice or information should be written or produced
in a professional style and should be edited, reviewed, and updated on
a regular basis.
What makes a High quality page? A High quality page should have a
beneficial purpose and achieve that purpose well. In addition, High
quality pages have the following characteristics:
● High level of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness
(E-A-T).
● A satisfying amount of high quality Main Content, including a
descriptive or helpful title.
● Satisfying website information and/or information about who is
responsible for the website. If the page is primarily for shopping or
includes financial transactions, then it should have satisfying
customer service information.
● Positive website reputation for a website that is responsible for
the Main Content on the page. Positive reputation of the creator of
the main content, if different from that of the website.
For all other pages that have a beneficial purpose, the amount of
expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) is very
important. Please consider:
● The authoritativeness of the creator of the Main Content, the Main
Content itself, and the website.
● The trustworthiness of the creator of the Main Content, the Main
Content itself, and the website.
Here you can see the main goal: important for life and your users money information from identified experts who have authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Also here, the goal is to increase the trust and reliability of websites that have an identified person or organization responsible for the website. This goal may be an obstacle to the false information and deceit that is on the web.
How can this information be useful for your medical website?
- It is probably necessary to indicate on your website full legal information about your business: legal business name, registration number and name of the registration institution, business address, the Dun & Bradstreet DUNS number, the Global Location Number (GLN, sometimes also referred to as International Location Number or ILN), the number of The International Standard of Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC), Revision 4 code, the Lei code as an organization identifier that uniquely identifies a legal entity as defined in ISO 17442, the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code, the Tax / Fiscal ID of the organization or person, e.g. the TIN in the US or the CIF/NIF in Spain, the Value-added Tax ID. It is not a requirement to specify all of the data, but the higher the level of information the higher the trust to your website.
It is probably necessary to state clearly on the home page the person or organization responsible for the content of the website. It will be useful here to create the opportunity to identify this person or organization.
If your website represents a business and / or is connected with sales, you should clearly indicate the customer service department and the person responsible for this with his contact points.
If your website has medical articles (for example, a blog), then you need to specify the author of each article and create the possibility of identifying this author as a medical expert. For this, it may be useful to create separate web pages for each of your author. On these web pages, create complete information about the author as a medical expert. Create an opportunity to identify the author as a medical expert, for example: indicate the place of his study/training and install a link to a digital copy of his dimloma, create links to awards of him, create links for medical societies, associations and programs in which this author participates, create links to previous author's publications in extraneous websites and so on.
The same is likely to apply to your medical staff if your website represents some kind of medical business.
It may also be important how your website is optimized with technical SEO (this is always important): download speed for mobile, information in meta tags, website architecture and hierachic structure of each web page, usability, UX and so on.
Check how your website meets to the requirements Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness: EAT and optimize the website in accordance with this.
Has deleting thin content
... also Google has always favoured 'long' content, this is no hidden secret and 1,000-2,000 words are neither thin or long. It doesn't matter how well written an article may be, if no one is engaging then it's not doing any favours for the site. Nowadays, post less often, with more engaging content is the key. Thousands of articles with little interaction is bad SEO.