Too much content?

Can you have too much content on your sites?

About a month or so ago, I committed myself, removed pages from v7n that were xxx number of days old, had less than xxx number of page views, and less than xxx number of responses. Just to be sure that I didn’t remove any worthwhile discussions, I went through the list and checked anything that might be remotely worthwhile.

And I did not delete the threads - I simply moved them to a private, hidden, admin-access-only forum.

Within a couple weeks, I started to see the remaining pages performing much better. Within two weeks, search engine referrals were up 7,000 per day.

But as one commenter points out:

I’m seeing a doubling of traffic from Google over the past week or two and have done nothing different. I think there has been a significant improvement in the Google algorithm, although I’ve seen little discussion on that.

I can confirm that I too have noticed an increase on Google searches to some of my sites. Makes it hard to do any sort of controlled experimenting when you don’t know what’s going on at Google. Still, who knows? It makes sense that a link to one of 10,000 pages might be of less value than a link to one of 2,000.

On the other hand, I think Google sometimes does the pruning for you. I have some sites that don’t have a ton of pages indexed by Google, but they get great traffic from the ones that are indexed. That suggests to me Google’s algo is picking and choosing somehow, presumably trying to deliver your best pages.