When to delete low quality content
-
If 75% of a site is poor quality, but still accounts for 35% of the traffic to the site, should the content be 404ed? Or, would it be better to move it to a subdomain and set up 301 re-directs? This site was greatly affected by Panda.
-
Thank you for the reply. I should add that this 75% of the content is an application (i.e. it is all the same). So the traffic is about the same on all of the pages. We need to choose between 404-ing the content or putting it on a subdomain. Do you know if having thin content on a subdomain will affect the original domain? I've been searching for a while, but can't seem to find anything concrete about this. Thanks!
-
I am not saying this very loudly... but I sometimes toss out a little ditty of content to see if it pulls any traffic and to see where it positions in the SERPs. I use these as "scouts" to identify easy targets. If it works then I know that a larger investment in content will pay off.
-
Good point. I would go further into exploring which pages / phrases have been cut most and work out any common elements of all that have been affected and define a plan of attack. If you have more than 100 articles it would take some time before it's all fixed. It's all about prioritising.
A good place to take a peek at is Google Webmaster Tools which shows search trends and CTR data as well.
-
How about upgrading the content?
Look at your analytics. Identify the pages there that are getting the most traffic. Start with them and continue.
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
-
High or low volume keyword
Does it take longer to rank on high volume versus a low volume keyword ? if so why Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Should you bother disallowing low quality links with brand/non-commercial anchor text?
Hi Guys, Doing a link audit and have come across lots of low quality web directories pointing to the website. Most of the anchor text of these directories are the websites URL and not comercial/keyword focused anchor text. So if thats the case should we even bother doing a link removal request via google webmaster tools for these links, as the anchor text is non-commercial? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spyaccounts140 -
Do low quality subdomains affect the ranking performance/quality of a root domain?
Hi, Late last year the company I work for launched two new websites that, at the time, we believed were completely separate from our main website. The two new websites were set up externally and were not well-planned from an SEO perspective (LOTS of duplicate content) - hence, they have struggled to rank on Google. Since the launch of the new websites we have also noticed that our main website (that previously ranked very well) has suffered a decline in visitation and search engine rank. We initially attributed this to a number of factors, including the state of the market, and ramped up our SEO efforts (seeing minor improvement). We have since realised that these two new websites have been set up as subdomains of our main website, with MOZ displaying the same domain authority and root domain backlink profile. My question is, do poor quality subdomains affect the ranking performance of a root domain? I have not yet managed to find a definitive answer. Please let me know if more information is required - I am quite new to the whole SEO concept. Thanks! Amy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulissai0 -
.co.uk domain with romanian content
Hello, I want to build a blog on a .co.uk domain that targets Romanians from uk. The blog will be in Romanian. What recommendation do you have regarding Google, should I submit the website to google.co.uk or google.ro. Did you had any cases like this? Cornel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornel_Ilea0 -
Duplicate Content Warning For Pages That Do Not Exist
Hi Guys I am hoping someone can help me out here. I have had a new site built with a unique theme and using wordpress as the CMS. Everything was going fine but after checking webmaster tools today I noticed something that I just cannot get my head around. Basically I am getting warnings of Duplicate page warnings on a couple of things. 1 of which i think i can understand but do not know how to get the warning to go. Firstly I get this warning of duplicate meta desciption url 1: / url 2: /about/who-we-are I understand this as the who-we-are page is set as the homepage through the wordpress reading settings. But is there a way to make the dup meta description warning disappear The second one I am getting is the following: /services/57/ /services/ Both urls lead to the same place although I have never created the services/57/ page the services/57/ page does not show on the xml sitemap but Google obviously see it because it is a warning in webmaster tools. If I press edit on services/57/ page it just goes to edit the /services/ page/ is there a way I can remove the /57/ page safely or a method to ensure Google at least does not see this. Probably a silly question but I cannot find a real comprehensive answer to sorting this. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | southcoasthost0 -
Fresh content has had a negative affect on my SERPs
Hi there, I was ranking pretty well for highly competitive keywords without actually doing any link building please see graph attached, so I thought I have an opportunity here in getting to page 1 for these keywords, the plan was to write fresh & original content for these pages, because hey Google loves fresh content, right? Well it seems NOT, after one week of these pages been re-written (21st Feb 2012), all of these pages dropped all together, please note: all the pages were under the same directory: /health/flu/keyword-1 /health/flu/keyword-2 and so on... I have compared both pages as I have back ups of the old content On Average there are more words on each of the new pages compared to previous pages Lower bounce rate by at least 30% (Via Adwords) More time on site by at least 2 minutes (Via Adwords) More page visits (Via Adwords) Lower keyword density, on average 4% (new pages) compared to 9% (old content) across all pages So since the end of February, these pages are still not ranked for these keywords, the funny thing is, these keyword are on page 1 of Bing. Another NOTE: We launched an irish version of the website, using the exact same content, I have done all the checks via webmaster tools making sure it's pointing to Ireland, I have also got hreflang tags on both website (just in case) If anyone can help with this that would be very much appreciated. Thanks ZCJDa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Duplicate page content
Hi. I am getting error of having duplicate content on my website and pages its showing there are: www.mysitename.com www.mysitename.com/index.html As my best knowledge it only one page, I know this can be solved with some conical tag used in header, but do not know how. Can anyone please tell me about that code or any other way to get this solved. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinetraffic0 -
Should I do something about this duplicate content? If so, what?
On our real estate site we have our office listings displayed. The listings are generated from a scraping script that I wrote. As such, all of our listings have the exact same description snippet as every other agent in our office. The rest of the page consists of site-wide sidebars and a contact form. The title of the page is the address of the house and so is the H1 tag. Manually changing the descriptions is not an option. Do you think it would help to have some randomly generated stuff on the page such as "similar listings"? Any other ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0