new here and confused, (Hello Everyone)

content vs. clean look & redirects

[webspace1]

Hello everyone,
I've been reading the forum for a couple days now and I have a few questions. In most posts they mention "content is king" but then on other posts it says "simple is best" and they refer to the clean look of google. How do I know what is the proper balance of content vs. clean? Most things I read say to have between 200-400 words per page, but others tell me that if a user see's that much text they will probably hit the back button.

The next question is I have a very large site that has a lot of excess pages now, but they are listed in google, I don't use these pages anymore and I would prefer to redirect them to the more suitable page, but I still like them being spidered since the keywords are right on topic for the new pages they redirect to. The only problem with them is they are poorly written, but google seems to like them so I don't see any reason to lose that traffic when I can send it to pages that are nicer for the viewers.

Jerry

[pmac]

Welcome [webmasterworld.com] to WebmasterWorld webspace1.

>they are poorly written, but google seems to like them<

Fix them. No sense in keeping a page that is poorly done just for the sake of Google. Don't be paralyzed by fear of losing rankings because you want to improve your site for your visitors. Google is more about link structure and anchor text at the moment than whats on the page.