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My website has two main sections of content to it. For illustration purposes let's call them foo and bar.

example.com/foo   60 pages
example.com/bar   25 pages

Section foo isn't doing very well. The content was much harder to rank for and they're getting close to 0 visits on all pages. The pages have been live for over a year and I don't anticipate them getting much traffic anytime soon.

Section bar on the other hand is doing pretty well. It's a few months old and is seeing promising traffic. 99% of my site traffic comes directly from the bar section of my website.

Should I be concerned that the poor engagement from foo might negatively impact the bar section of the site? If so, what options do I have if I'd like to eventually build up both sections of the site?

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  • Rank and popularity are two different things. It sounds like you are describing popularity and not rank.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Feb 11, 2016 at 22:40
  • That's very true. I didn't think about that. As long as I don't have thin content on foo I should be okay, right? Follow up to that: At what point does it make sense to maintain unpopular content?
    – Jordan
    Commented Feb 11, 2016 at 22:44
  • Sure. As long as your content and site are high quality. However, keep in mind your overall CTR from search to your site as well as bounce rate. If you can keep CTR high enough and BR low enough, then you should do fine. However, if one set of content is performing very poorly in this regard, then perhaps it is time to say goodbye. It is a watch and wait game. See how you can compare yourself to other sites and how to improve based upon what you see. If all seems okay, then figure out how to smoke the competition.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Feb 11, 2016 at 22:51
  • Anytime!! We are here for you. There are some real experts here. Some will surprise you!!
    – closetnoc
    Commented Feb 11, 2016 at 22:54

2 Answers 2

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The key factor to make decision whether to keep or to resign the folder, which ranks not so good, is traffic. No traffic in the past and currently, no chances on traffic in the future and no possibility to optimize - delete the folder doubtless. If you can't delete them (i.e. because user need them), then noindex the folder.

Main tasks of SEO are:

  • to create more pages, which get traffic
  • to find and to remove from index (delete or noindex) as much as possible pages getting no traffic.

Doing so, there would remain only pages with traffic (good optimized, with good content, with good UX)

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I think you need to answer the question why foo content is unpopular. Starting with whether you think it SHOULD BE POPULAR. If it ought to be more popular than it is it sounds as if you need to revisit things like your keyword strategy and perhaps internal linking. If it is now apparent that it is just not popular at all, then I would be inclined to keep the pages if they are original content. However I would create links from them to relevant popular pages on your site or on other sites (high reputation). That maintains your content and puts you in a "good neighbourhood". Better than simply deleting them.

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