Deleting unwanted old content with least views

[sandyk20]

We have couple of large sites and due to hardware limitations we are planning to mass delete lot of old content.

Sites are forums, blogs or article sites, we are planning to mass delete only content which was made more then 1000 days ago and with least views.

Is this safe or unsafe ?

[vincevincevince]

It is safe, but probably foolish unless that content is irrelevant to searchers today.

[eelixduppy]

Make an archive. These files aren't accessed regularly and therefore don't need to be using up necessary system resources. By making an archive you are taking them away from the most used parts of your site while keeping them live so they may still be read by someone visiting.

>> hardware limitations

If your hardware limitation is diskspace then upgrade :)

[sandyk20]

vincevincevince thanks for your replies to most of our topics :) we appreciate your help for same, those content is irrelevant to searches today

We were keeping a track of all our content since last 60 days and noticed we did not get any referrals from search engines or sites for same.. we are deleting all those content from our site(s).

lets same from 100000 articles are mass pruning around 20000 articles.

hello eelixduppy,
All this sites are dynamic (data is in mysql database) this takes lot of CPU + MEMORY usage, disk space usage overall the server is maximum of 10% only.

[phranque]

how can those dynamic pages use any cpu or memory if they are not being requested?

[sandyk20]

because of this unwanted data mysql database size has gone to 500 mb+ each with in all 4 sites running on 1 server (webserver + database server)