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.
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
-
I want to use some content that I sent out in a newsletter and post as a blog, but will this count as duplicate content?
I want to use some content that I sent out in a newsletter a while ago - adding it as a blog to my website. The newsletter exists on a http://myemail.constantcontact.com URL and is being indexed by Google. Will this count as duplicate content?
Content Development | | Wagada0 -
Duplicate Blog Content
Hey Mozzers! I have a client who is a dentist, with multiple offices, and wants to use an identical blog post (including images, alt text, text, tags, everything pretty much) from one of his office's website on his other office's website to save time and mimic the success of the original content for his other office. Everything I've researched says this is a HUGE no-no, but I'd love to hear if anyone else has tried to do something like this and if they were successful in doing so (implementing rel=cannonical or 301?). Also, if he is the owner of both sites and they both receive low traffic will Google even notice? My biggest worry is that if I did post the content on his other site, identically, that it would dilute the visibility of the original post, which has and is continuing to surpass our organic search goals... The main goal though, is to drive traffic to BOTH sites via organic search using the same content. Would love to hear everyone's opinions if this is possible or unrealistic... Thanks! -D
Content Development | | Derrald0 -
Is it possible to aggregate news content?
Currently all of our content is produced internally, but I would like to expirement with aggregating 50% of our content from external publishers. The content wouldn't be full articles, but instead the excepts with a link back to the source. Is there a way to aggregate content without being penalized? We are using wordpress.
Content Development | | ejovi0 -
Spinning software advice / suggestions
I have 2 websites which sell exactly the same products and have the same product descriptions. Does anyone have any recommended spinning software solutions which I can use to get an alternate product description? Thanks in advance.
Content Development | | Anup_Gohil0 -
What are the best content writer sites?
Hi, I'm doing some work on a new blog and wondered if anyone could recommend some low cost content writers? I have only justed started researching this service, so any advice the SEOmoz community could give would be grately appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Content Development | | RBH0 -
Duplicate Page Content WordPress blog with categories?
Just got a crawl report back from SEOmoz and it gives me lots of errors for "duplicate page content". Upon investigating, I notice this is because my WP blog is setup into categories so the home page is almost identical to one of the category pages. None of my actually posts are the same but the category pages have some overlap since the same post could show up in two or more categories. Is this a problem or can I just ignore this error? Any thing I should be doing differently? Thanks!
Content Development | | frankthetank20 -
How quickly should one add content?
I'm building a content site (the model is AdSense revenue) around a certain niche, and I'm currently paying for about 6 articles to be contributed per week. I have the capacity to be paying for a lot more articles, however, so I'm wondering what, if any, factors exist to recommend building the site up slowly as opposed to throwing on e.g. 100 articles over the next week? Those I can think of are: 1. Going slowly leaves room for better keyword optimization etc. 2. Google seems to favor aged domains/content, so 100 good articles now certainly isn't as advantageous as 100 articles 2 years from now. All that being said, I still feel like the benefit in terms of traffic of adding more content now - since I can - might outweigh these considerations. Does anyone have any thoughts?
Content Development | | ZakGottlieb710 -
Duplicate Content - Video
I recently noticed a drop in rankings for my site shortly after the new algorithm update. I'm not sure exactly why rankings went down, but would like to know if it has to do with having videos on our site that do not belong to us. We have a few videos on product pages that the manufacturer of the product had created. I was wondering if Google maybe thinks we are maliciously stealing these videos or something and penalizing us for it. And if stuff like this has anything to do with the recent algorithm update. We make our own videos, but some of our manufacturer's videos are just better... and they work with us and are glad for us to have their videos listed. Thanks in advance
Content Development | | poolguy0