Articles that can hurt your brand

But get you better rankings

[danpeg]

I am facing a dilemma: On one hand, I have a few dozen articles ready to be published that could potentially positively affect my site's ranking for some important keywords. On the other hand, these articles would probably have a negative influence of my website's brand given the their mediocrity.

How would you go about publishing these articles without hurting your brand?

I have thought about a couple of solutions:

1. Get a new domain and create a new website with these articles - and then link to my main brand. Downside: This would take a long time until the domain is out of the sandbox and is indexed.

2. Add the articles to the main website but not link to them from the rest of the site. Thus only traffic gained by these articles would be able to read them. Downside: new articles would not gain by being linked from the other high PR pages and the brand would still be at risk.

Any help is welcome.

[Eltiti]

Is there any reason why you cannot simply make the articles less "mediocre"? (E.g., have they been written by a 3rd party who doesn't allow you to modify them?) If you can, simply make the articles *better*!

[Syzygy]

...these articles would probably have a negative influence of my website's brand given the their mediocrity.

How would you go about publishing these articles without hurting your brand?

I agree with Eltiti, and would not publish mediocrity.

Solution 3. Rewrite them, or get some less mediocre content.

Mediocre content serves no one in the long run, IMHO.

Syzygy

[rogerd]

In general, I'd say adding poor quality content to a "branded" site is a big mistake. It's one thing to throw that kind of stuff on an affiliate site as search engine fodder, but another thing entirely to do it where it may affect the visitor's perception of the site/company.

I'd rewrite it unless you aren't allowed to do so. If you can't change the articles, write some of your own or find a cheap copy writer who can do better than what you've got.