Is it possible to have too much content?

[Fammy]

Is it possible to have too much content? If so, how do we prove (or at least get evidence) one way or the other to whether we are being adversely affected in the SERPs?

The only way we could think of is to publish a lot less for a week or two, but nobody is willing to risk it.

Numbers wise we are publishing an average of 125 articles a day, with an archive of around 300k fwiw

thanks

[Chris.Menke]

I try not to read too much into what may lie behind the words of someone's question--I tend to get it wrong if I do : )

But it looks like I may have been on the right path with the quality issue.   Penalties are the result of descending down past some unknown quality threshold--on one day a site hadn't yet crossed the threshold, on the next, it had. One should always be thinking of how they may get even "closer to gold", as you say, as that keeps a site positioned better for the future.  Note: the correction of the"quality"/"quantity" typo in my original answer.

[EGOL]

hehe can I take the fifth?

lol.   No 

If you have any of the following types of content in quantity you can have a problem with Google's Panda algo.

--- lots of pages with small amounts of content - just a few sentences

--- lots of pages that are similar in content from page-to-page, such as service location pages with a few paragraphs and just the name of the geographic location changed

--- lots of pages that have articles that are also published on other domains

--- lots of pages with poor grammar, typos, etc

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

Read this article from a few weeks ago: http://moz.com/blog/broken-art-of-blogging

This talks about % of comments on a blog.

Your traffic levels seems decent enough. I would then dig deeper and work out the themes that got the most traffic / least traffic and write more based on the areas which get the most traffic.

Shame you cant share the website so I can have a further dig around.

[Fammy]

How many comments/shares is many? What % should we be chasing?

We're not doing content for SEO, it is intended for readers rather than botbait and Google Analytics is showing a few million pageviews and month, so the site is not sat unloved, but The Board wants moar traffic!

[Fammy]

Sorry if I was vague, I guess I assumed that since I was posting a question on here, then it was implied that I was unhappy with performance. Are many people on here asking questions about stuff they are happy with?

I am guessing a deep analysis is not something you can teach in a quick forum response if its not likely to be a quantity issue I guess I need to have thoughts and meetings off line and come back with more specific questions? - I don't have permission to share too many details about the site in question

[Fammy]

hehe can I take the fifth?  Seriously though, the new stuff will be closer to gold than crap I think (plus moz reports give us a lot of As) but even hypothetically if it were crap, would 50 tonnes of crap do worse than 5? Or does the stopped clock being correct twice a day come into play?

[Andy-Halliday]

it would depends on the length of the articles and the engagement.

Do you get many comments, share reads.

I would rather put out 2 articles a day that got a lot of readership and interactions that 125 that get nothing.

I could only judge if it was too  much on the interactions and readership.

Also if you are only producing content for SEO purposes, I would probably stop. Create content your users want to read.

[EGOL]

Some people have ounces of gold.  Some have tons of crap.

Numbers wise we are publishing an average of 125 articles a day

So, are these numbers ounces or tons?

[Chris.Menke]

Fammy, too much content would not normally be an issue.  However, with all that content getting published, it would be worth knowing whether the site is achieving its goals, or at least progressing smartly towards them.  If not, then it's possible that the content you're publishing is not accomplishing its purpose and if that's the case, quantity over quality may be at least, one of your issues.

It may also be possible that your emphasis on content creation is not allowing you time to properly organize your archive and you may be missing out on traffic that way.  Pausing your content creation  wouldn't give you insight on that but deep analysis of your analytics would certainly be helpful.