Thin/spun content or No content at all?
-
So I'm working on a site right now that has been plagued with spun/rewritten content..we are talking in the thousands.
Now would it be a smarter idea to just remove all the content or leave the content?
This is an ecommerce site and I'm tasking a few people to rewrite fresh authentic content. So all of the spun/thin content will be removed eventually.
The main question is to just delete it all right now or just replace as we go.
I'd like to know what you guys think.
-
In addition to what EGOL suggested, which is right on - you could also check to see which pages are indexed but not receiving traffic (for say the last 3 months). I would do this by crawling the site and comparing an export of your product pages to an export of your organic landing pages from analytics. Any products that Google has indexed, but not ranking or returning in search are good ones to noindex until you make them better.
-Dan
-
There might not have been a manual spam action taken against the site but it could be suffering from a Panda problem from the thin content.
See information about Panda in Marine Haynes post here...
-
The site itself has valuable and authentic content EXCEPT product pages.
I've got in touch with the spam team at Google and there was no spam action taken on the site. However, I still feel the product pages are doing poorly since I Google the exact text in the product description without "" would not provide that product page...instead links to a article directory (spun content).
-
I would look at the ratio of thin/duplicate content to rich/unique content.
Does your homepage and category pages have rich unique content right now? If they do then you might noindex the product pages and hope that the pages that are still in the index recover.
Then start authoring the content that has the best potential to bring in search traffic. Do that first and work your way down to the lower value pages.
If you have thin content everywhere.... I would reauthor my most valuable pages immediately, publish that then noindex the rest in priority of search traffic potential.
Before I put all of that work into a site, I would be sure that it doesn't have a Penguin or unnatural links problem.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Project content marketing SEO value and Traffic
I'm creating a content marketing plan and need to project the visitor impact it could have on an exact-keyword domain name. The plan will produce at least 10 quality, original articles per day. Are there any common metrics or ways to guess what the visitor impact could be?
Content Development | | msantore821 -
How to promote your blog content
Hi there, we've been blogging for a while now. Some of our content ranks quit well, other posts don't seem to be ranking at all. The weird thing (I think it's weird...) is that we recently published a post and focussed on a phrase that competes with over 400 million indexed pages, and after 3 weeks we're on page 3, and for other posts with only 2.5 million indexed pages we rank past page 5 (ok, this post is already 1,5 year old, does this matter?). To give you some background info, we moved our blog in January in a new subdomain, and redirected the old url's, but didn't actively promote the old posts. Would promoting the old articles through social media help us boost the rankings for these articles (the articles are "best practices", "how-to's", ...). Where / how do you promote your content after you published it on your blog? I find it hard posting in LinkedIn groups related to finance while I have the "online marketing manager" title on my profile. Why would a finance professional read an article shared by a marketing dude? As LinkedIn's API doensn't allow to post into groups anymore, do you actually go through all your relevant groups every time you publish a new blog to share the article?
Content Development | | jorisbrabants1 -
How Are You Handling Blog Posts/Author Pages when Employees Leave the Company?
What do you believe to be the best approach in handling blog content for employees once they have left the company? We don’t want to remove the blog posts so they need to stay, but then there are the author pages. This gets tricky because the CMS ties the blog post to the author. One approach might be to change the author’s name to the Company’s name to get around author pages for people no longer with the company. It’s kind of tricky because the blog posts won’t have the same credibility if they don’t have a person’s name/photo associated with the post. We could leave the blogger’s page and list him as a “Contributing Author” once he’s left the company. Thoughts?
Content Development | | RosemaryB0 -
Creating the best content in your industry
Im currently working with a new client and their goal is to create the absolute best content in their industry. I've seen alot of articles on WHY to create the best content but not a lot on HOW to create the best content. Can anyone recommend a article they recall which talked more about the HOW. I'm looking for a process on how to create awesome content, how to go about it. Any suggestions?
Content Development | | monster990 -
Will Scrape Content Become Unique Content
I always scrape content from article directories and make it unique through TBS with copyscape passed but i still want to know will google detect the content is not unique.. I unable to write content myself because somewhat english problem.. i know there is lots of cheap article writer available but still is there any way to success ?
Content Development | | mamuti0 -
Syndicating content with rel=author tag in it
If I have an article with my rel=author tag attached to it, and then I syndicate that article to another web site, should I keep the rel=author tag in that synbdicated article? Basically, what I'm worried about is that there will be 2 duplicate articles with my author tag on 2 different web sites. (I intend to put a canonical tag in the syndicated article so there is no duplicate content penalty) What is the best practice for this?
Content Development | | greggseo0 -
Press Releases and Duplicate Content on Event Related Site
I have a site that lists events. I ask those submitting events to submit original content if possible, but frequently they submit press releases which are already published elsewhere. I rewrite some of the press releases, but do not have time to rewrite every press release that comes my way. I want my users to get a comprehensive list of events, but I don't want get a penalty for duplicate content. What is the best solution?
Content Development | | andywozhere0 -
Best way to avoid duplicate content issues here.
I am planning to write an article that refutes some claims made in another article. The original article is a 20 page pdf. What I plan to do is to take quotes from this PDF and then under each quote write my arguments for or against the quote. If I take direct quotes from the article, is Google likely to see this as duplicate content?
Content Development | | MarieHaynes0