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
-
What are some good examples of content marketing done well for clothing online retailers?
Hello, I am working on planning for a redesign of a eCommerce clothing website. Looking for some inspiration on some good examples of clothing companies using their content well. The design does not have to be the best, it can be just very well done use of blog type content or video. Thank you in advance for taking time to respond!
Content Development | | srbello0 -
Will having duplicate content on four websites cause a problem?
A client of ours has four websites for different shops they run in the surrounding area. Each website has original content as well as duplicate content. This is for things like product advice which needs to be the same Will having duplicate content on these four websites cause a problem? How can it be mitigated? We can't refer the visitor to another website to get the product information as this will break the user experience, and of course shopping cart sessions will not pass on.
Content Development | | Rebecca.Holloway0 -
Content Syndication Strategies
Hi I'm currently doing some research into content syndication strategies for our new and existing client base. Does anyone on here have any case studies, better still, success stories that may help broaden my exposure within this topic? Many thanks Gary
Content Development | | GaryVictory0 -
What Content to Write - Hot Topic or More Niche Related?
Hi, Just for example, say you've got a shoe store but shoes are a non-searched-for topic on the informational side. Say fashion models or teenybopper shoppers are both hot topics. Would you recommend writing an article - one of the site's five >2000 word articles on a hot area of the hot topics? Or would you just stick to shoes topics? If you do write on the hotter topics, how does the shoe store owner write on these - they're out of his area of expertise? Does he need a content writer?
Content Development | | BobGW0 -
Get duplicate content error in seomoz even after fixed canonical
http://www.webworld.no - We have been getting error Page Duplicate Content Errors. But we have fixed the canonical. Actually, we have list of portfolio and detailed page for each portfolio But We get error all portfolio pages are having duplicate content. But, i made canonical tag to direct to root page. Please help me to overcome this. Also, i see duplicae webworld.no & www.webworld.no. is there anything i need to fix in redirection? in server?
Content Development | | Webworld_Norway0 -
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 -
How to best take advantage of content being used on another site?
We've never syndicated content or done "article marketing". Another site contacted us and requested to use the content on several of our webpages. The other site is a fairly prestigious nonprofit in our industry. We don't mind them using our content, but we want to get the most benefit out of it. There are two ways the occur to me: Have them create pages with the exact same text as on our pages, but put in the header of those pages Just have them create pages with the text from our pages with embedded links back to our other pages. Each page they create will say "Content courtesy of XXX" Does anyone have opinions on which way is best, or another approach?
Content Development | | DanCrean0 -
Forum Site: Content Value Post Panda
I run a forum website built on Wordpress. We're about two years old. The theme of the site is a directory of attorneys, with each directory listing having its own blog account on our site. Through this platform, we receive 75-80 blog posts now every month of varying quality from our users. QUESTION: A good number of the blogs published on our site are also published on the attorney's law firm site as well (they're syndicating on our site). Will this hurt our site in light of Panda? A lot of the syndicated content is very well written and insightful. By contrast, Will non-syndicated but average to below average posts hurt our site? The authors almost always link back to their firm site. Would love some feedback on whether we should be happy about the syndicated content or whether we should potentially ban it?
Content Development | | JSOC0