Is it possible to have too much content?
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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!
-
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
-
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?
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
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
-
Is it possible to reverse a G algo update (Penguin/Panda)?
...if yes, how? Can you share resources / blogs / etc... I want to reverse my site's rankings. Here's the gist of it: I recently purchased a website that has 600+ pieces of aged content on it. Domain was ranking great about 10 years ago (1M uniques a year) It apparently got hit by a G algo update in 2012/2013 (Penguin and Panda?), because the rankings have tanked (10 hits a day) In the past two years, the previosu owner published about 100+ off-topic blog posts and it appears been using the site as a PBN. The UX sucks and there's a ton of 404s. (NOTE: I am in the process of removing that content and have cleaned up the 404s). Domain stats: 20+ years old (1998) and DA 32, linking domains 850+, inbound links of 16k+ What I've done: disavow (550 domains), fix all the 404s What I'm doing / about to do: remove spammy content write new/fresh on-topic content update the site UX start a backlink building campaign My questions: is it common to bounce back from a G algo update? is it hard / am I over my head / am I a sucker trying to get the site back alive? are there articles about bouncing back that you can share so I can learn more about this process? Or agencies / consultants, etc that you recommend? what other recommendations / suggestions do you have that would help reverse this 8-year-old penalty?
Reporting & Analytics | | seo.owl0 -
Metadata and duplicate content issues
Hi there: I'm seeing a steady decline in organic traffic, but at the same time and increase in pageviews and direct traffic. My site has about 3,000 crawl errors!! Errors are duplicate content, missing description tags, and description too long. Most of these issues are related to events that are being imported from Google calendars via ical and the pages created from these events. Should we block calendar events from being crawled by using the disallow directive in the robots.txt file? Here's the site: https://www.landmarkschool.org/
Reporting & Analytics | | BGR0 -
Is it possible to have a GA event and a GA virtual pageview fire off of the same click?
If we can only choose one, we'll likely go with the Event, but I'm hoping we'll be able to do both and gather more data about when certain pages (even if they are virtual) are viewed in the path to conversion.
Reporting & Analytics | | KNect3650 -
Is it possible?
Hi! Is it possible to have your UA code in a GTM and your e-commerce code in the code? Will it track the e-commerce data in the profile? Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | WeAreDigital_BE
Sander0 -
Google Analytics Content Experiments - Experiment Conversions and Goal Figures Don't Match
Hi, I set up a new content experiment 6 days ago, the experiment says there have been 2 conversions but the goal associated with it says 5. The experiment is set to target 100% of traffic, distributed evenly among the variations, the goal is a destination URL goal. I've doubled checked the goal set up and everything seems fine. How can the content experiment report a different figure to the goal associated with it? Has anyone else noticed the same problem? Is this a bug? Is there a workaround available? Or is there a setting I need to be aware of when creating content experiments to prevent this from happening? I need to know I can trust the results the content experiments provide.
Reporting & Analytics | | UNIT40 -
What is the best way to eliminate this specific image low lying content?
The site in question is www.homeanddesign.com where we are working on recovering from some big traffic loss. I finally have gotten the sites articles properly meta titled and descriptioned now I'm working on removing low lying content. The way there CMS is built, images have their own page (every one that's clickable). So this leads to a lot of thin content that I think needs to be removed from the index. Here is an example: http://www.homeanddesign.com/photodisplay.asp?id=3633 I'm considering the best way to remove it from the index but not disturb how users enjoy the site. What are my options? Here is what I'm thinking: add Disallow: /photodisplay to the robots.txt file See if there is a way to make a lightbox instead of a whole new page for images. But this still leaves me with 100s of pages with just an image on there with backlinks, etc. Add noindex tag to the photodisplay pages
Reporting & Analytics | | williammarlow0 -
Google Analytics Content Experiments
Has anyone else found that Google Analytics Content Experiments seems to quite quickly favor the best performing variant in an experiment, and then show that variant many times more often than other/s - not split the traffic evenly? What is Google's thinking behind 'optimizing' during an experiment? It seems odd to me.
Reporting & Analytics | | David_ODonnell0 -
Is it possible to attached separate analytic codes for each campaign?
I am having difficulty in using different GA codes for each individual campaign- this must be possible. Can someone please advice. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ChrisDingley0