Be brutily honest - What do you think of this old content?
-
My website reports on news relating to certain web hosting providers, and being hit by the latest phantom update a little I am looking back a little more harshly on some of my content with especially the older articles needing alot of work (I know some areas on the site need work), and there are some articles I am just not sure about.
I have listed a few OLD articles below
https://www.besthostnews.com/the-power-of-shared-web-hosting-by-bluehost/
https://www.besthostnews.com/siteground-sponsors-wordcamp-london/
https://www.besthostnews.com/free-ebook-guide-to-starting-a-website-on-a-budget-a-small-orange/
These are 3 old articles that I have previously updated several months ago, but are they good enough. Due to the nature of the site sometimes I will report on certain news \ features that a web host releases, and sometimes there is very little to write about. These are probably a good example where I feel there is a struggle to write enough or the quality is perhaps lower than something that has more information to report on.
I would appreciate some harsh critical view points \ and perhaps suggestions on how to improve my writing style for these kind of generic style posts.
-
I think you are right here... and yes, I think a change of strategy is required in light of the way Google is heading with this latest update and how other similar sites are suffering.
I am starting to formulate a plan, and your response kind of reinforced it.
-
The articles look fine to me.
I don't know much about the hosting industry or how many people are searching for this type of news.
I have a site that has been covering the news of an industry for about 10 years. When I started covering the news, I wrote articles like you are writing. They were a lot of work and the content was not evergreen.
After doing that for a year or so I decided that my time would be better spent by: 1) writing more evergreen articles covering basic information about the industry, and, 2) making brief posts (two sentences and an image) of news items and linking to the original source. That used my time for more profitable purposes (evergreen articles can pull traffic for years) and still satisfied my visitors' interest in news. In fact, the number of people subscribing to the news blog rose rapidly because I linked to six to ten stories per day instead of writing one or two. Lots of people began arriving at my site and clicking the news link. The number of people subscribing to my email and RSS feed quickly rose into five digit numbers.
A couple years ago the site slipped rankings in one of the Panda updates, even though I was purging old news posts once or twice per year. I assume that Google didn't like lots of two sentence blog posts so I noindexed them and got out of Panda within a few weeks.
More recently, I decided to make one post per day that would simply contain a list of about eight links to news items on other sites. This saved more of my time and reduced the amount of skimpy pages on the site. Lots of people still arrive at the homepage and click into the news. People are still subscribing and writing to me with thanks for offering this news as a free service.
I don't know if your audience wants this. I don't know how many competitors you have offering similar news for this industry. I don't know if you are getting lots of traffic from search into your news posts. Those are all items that I would consider. But, I would weigh the opportunity of writing evergreen content instead of ephemeral.
-
Nope, they had a quick spike but if you see my link, they plummeted shortly after. Basically they spoke too soon.
-
No Jonathan. SERoundTable is all safe. Check this post:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-weekend-20247.html -
Yeh, I follow seroundtable, but they also got hammered by this update... probably much more so then I did.:
http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research/domains/organic?acc=154293&url=seroundtable.com&cc=US
-
Hey Jonathan,
I do not find any kind of problem except the size of content which is not a huge problem for me. If you follow Barry Schwartz's SERoundTable blog, he also reports news and releases kind of posts which are generally low in word count.
Are you sure this "Phantom" update causes the traffic down? As far as I know, this update will mainly target to "How-TO" kind of low quality posts.
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
-
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 -
How much do I have to differentiate syndicated content, exactly?
We have about 15-20 articles we'll repurpose on a partner domain (think: media outlet). To avoid duplicate content suspicion, how much exactly do we need to differentiate the content on the second domain? Yea, this is assuming we can't obtain a canonical for whatever reason. I've found some good advice here, but am looking for some quantification. Like: "A sentence/paragraph of introduction at the top of the piece, plus a link back to the original at the end of said introduction ought to do it." Any help is appreciated. Thanks! Tim
Content Development | | Jen_Floyd0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi Does anyone know a site where i can paste text to test for duplication? We've used some outstanding freelancer copywriters in the past but need to check the authenticity of the article created before publishing, Thanks Gary
Content Development | | GaryVictory0 -
Ecommerce site content upgrade timescale.
I have been upgrading my sites content and structure and I have been wondering how long I should wait for a traffic increase before I should think it has been a failure and try a new plan of attack?
Content Development | | mark_baird0 -
Am I spreading my content & site thin?
I have a video section on my site. Basically I am filtering quality videos for my readers to check out. The videos are pretty much all embedded youtube/vimeo vids. There are a few categories, which are pretty niche-y in relation to my readers. In general they probably aren't seen as too relevant to the overall content on my site... Is it a mistake to keep these videos up? Could they be messing up my rankings since they aren't necessarily in line with the rest of the content on my site?
Content Development | | PedroAndJobu0 -
Should I put the date on a new content page to show users when it was written or updated?
I've been asked this question at work and not certain of the answer. Personally if I see an 'old' date in a meta description on Google I often scan for more recent articles. In other words it can act as a deterrent. We are a very big social networking site with a large content section. For some of our content the date might be relevant, such as legal information, but often it isn't. Are there any SEO factors in dating content?
Content Development | | CecilyP0 -
Is it advisable to have unique pages for different cities/states though there wouldnt be any actual differentiation in the actual content.
Is it advisable to have unique pages for different cities/states though there wouldnt be any actual differentiation in the content. For example should we have separate pages for "hammers in california" & "hammers in new york". The product is same and content more or less the same. The search volume for individual queries is low but collectively makes a large number. The unique title tag automatically will generate traffic. So does it make sense to make 50 such pages. Else is there any way to uniquely target 50 such queries/month/city
Content Development | | DYo0 -
Duplicate content?
I am not understanding this - I see a duplicate content warning. When I look into it I see these two urls: http;//search-engine-upgrade.com http;//search-engine-upgrade.com/default.asp (NOT a blog)
Content Development | | dcmike0