Hi, we have a large area of our site that is reference content. It is useful, but when users come in externally from google, most of the time they immediately get their answer and then leave. This area thus has an extremely high bounce rate.... upwards of 90%.

We don't want to just remove the content, because it is both interesting and useful. But, we are afraid that the extremely high bounce area is hurting the site at large. It feels to me like google is penalizing our entire site as "thin content" or "high bounce" because of this one area.

My questions:

a) is my fear grounded in fact? can one part of a site hurt the entirety?

b) if yes -- if we move this thin / high bounce content to a sub.domain.com, will google treat it and our domain.com as two different sites? Or should we move it to an enirely other domain?

Thanks