Should you delete old content to maintain your site's theme?

Maintaining a site's theme - How it affects your ranking

[errorsamac]

I have an old website that is updated daily and has good backlinks (PR5). The site is broken down in to two sections - products and widgets. Every day, new products get added to the site (/product1, /product2, etc) while the widget pages stay the same (the content changes, but the number of widget pages is static).

I am finding that as I add products to the site, my Google SERP rankings for widgets decrease. It feels like Google says.. "oh, you are more of a product site now, not a widget site" and they are ranking me accordingly. Also if you look at Googlebot hits for products vs widgets, you'll see Googlebot loves the products more than the widgets.

To maintain a widget theme instead of a product theme, should I delete old product pages that are no longer available? For example, should I keep a page for a product that sold out in 2005 when it will not be in stock again and it offers no value except adding to the number of pages to the site? I worry about deleting thousands of old products from the site and Google flipping out because of all the 404s it will hit.

Does anyone have experience with page themes and how it affects rankings? How about with massive deletes of pages and the Google reaction to that (does the abrupt 404s + re-shift to the old theme (due to the deleted pages) cause some kind of penalty?

[Quadrille]

Think of your visitors.

If these pages of sold out items will confuse or frustrate your visitors, the damage that does will outweigh anything losing a few pages can do.

Picture the scene; a visitor wants five items; the first two are sold out, and have been for months ... byeee ... lost business. And lost forever.

Don't obsess about Google until you've finished obsessing about your visitors. No point in Google getting you visitors if you send them straight to your competitors.

There's NOTHING worse than a site that fails to deliver.

[errorsamac]

I should clarify - real people aren't hitting these old product pages (they are buried on the site - it's possible to get there, but realistically I do not see any traffic there). My concern is how Google will react to the site going from 10,000 pages to 1,000 pages and the 9,000 deleted pages being 301'd to /products/ (nevermind the weekly deletes of old product pages to help keep the product to widget ratio at a constant rate). I am hoping this decreases the "product" theme on my site and increases the "widget" theme, but I'm afraid I'll trip some kind of google penalty for forcing it to revert to the old theme of the site.

[errorsamac]

Just replying to myself here. You can easily switch your site's theme by excluding the unwanted pages from robots.txt.

[Swanny007]

I'm with Quadrille on this one. Put your users first. Don't worry what Google thinks about the move. They don't control your site, you do (well your visitors do). If it makes sense to remove 9,000 unnecessary pages so be it. Yes, you could also block those pages using robots.txt, but if they add no value to the human visitors, it's senseless to keep the pages IMHO.

Also think quality, not quantity.

[edited by: Swanny007 at 7:56 pm (utc) on June 29, 2007]