Does integration of external supplemenatry data help or hurt regarding googles perception of content quality? (e.g weather info, climate table, population info, currency exchange data via API or open source databases)
-
We just lost over 20% traffic after google algo update at June 26.
In SEO forums people guess that there was likely a Phantom update or maybe a Panda update.The most common advice I found was adding more unique content. While we have already unique proprietary content on all our pages and we plan to add more, I was also considering to add some content from external sources. Our site is travel related so I thought about adding for each city page external data such as weather, climate data, currency exchange data via APIs from external sources and also some data such as population from open source databases or some statistical info we would search on the web.
I believe this data would be useful to the visitors. I understand that purely own content would be ideal and we will work on this as well.
Any thoughts? Do you think the external data may rather help or hurt how google perceives content quality?
-
Everett, thanks so much. Also the link for the quality rater guidelines was very interesting and useful.
-
iCourse,
It used to be that Google told their Quality Raters to look for "Supplementary Content". This has recently been removed from their Handbook for Quality Raters, and you can learn more about it here: http://www.thesempost.com/updated-google-quality-rater-guidelines-eat/ .
That said, they probably removed it because people were showing unrelated supplementary content, or because QRs were marking pages with lots of supplementary content and very little unique body content as "High Quality", which they are not.
In your case, all of the ideas you presented sounded like useful added information for someone on a local vacation or real estate page.
-
Hi Patrick, thanks these are very useful links for an audit. Also the Barracuda tool is great.
In our case we are already quite confident that our focus should be adding more content to our about 1000 city category pages.
My core doubt right now is really: Shall I as a quick first step add now to the city pages the mentioned data from external sources or may it rather hurt in the eyes of google. For visitors it would be useful. -
Hi there
What I would take a look at the algorithm updates and line up your analytics with the dates. Barracuda actually has a great tool to make this easy on you. Note what pages dropped the most. From there, I would look the following resources:
- How To Do a Content Audit (Moz)
- Link Audit Guide for Effective Link Removals & Risk Mitigation (Moz)
I am not so much worried about tools and plugins (as long as they are credible and you're not abusing them) as much as I am that usually travel sites that have to cover a lot of cities using the same content simply switching city names out. I would review duplicate content best practices and make sure you're not inadvertently abusing this tactic.
Let me know if this helps, happy to help where I can! Good luck!
Patrick
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
-
Google indexed "Lorem Ipsum" content on an unfinished website
Hi guys. So I recently created a new WordPress site and started developing the homepage. I completely forgot to disallow robots to prevent Google from indexing it and the homepage of my site got quickly indexed with all the Lorem ipsum and some plagiarized content from sites of my competitors. What do I do now? I’m afraid that this might spoil my SEO strategy and devalue my site in the eyes of Google from the very beginning. Should I ask Google to remove the homepage using the removal tool in Google Webmaster Tools and ask it to recrawl the page after adding the unique content? Thank you so much for your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ibis150 -
Site architecture, inner link strategy and duplicate or thin content HELP :)
Ok, can I just say I love that Moz exists! I am still very new to this whole website stuff. I've had a site for about 2 years that I have re-designed several times. It has been published this entire time as I made changes but I am now ready to create amazing content for my niche. Trouble is my target audience is in a very focused niche and my site is really only about 1 topic - life insurance for military families. I'm a military spouse who happens to be an experience life insurance agent offering plans to active duty service members, their spouses as well as veterans and retirees. So really I have 3 niches within a niche. I'm REALLY struggling on how to set up my site architecture. My site is basically fresh so it's a good time to get it hammered down as best as possible with my limited knowledge. Might I also add this is a very competitive space. My competitors are big, established brands who offer life insurance along with unaffiliated, informational sites like military.com or the va benefits site. The people in my niche rarely actually search for life insurance because they think they are all set by the military. When they do search it's very short which is common as this niche lives in a world of acronyms. I'm going to have to get real creative to see if there are any long tail keywords I can use as supporting posts but I think my best route is to attempt to rank for the short one to three keyword phrases this niche looks for while searching. Given my expertise on the subject I am able to write long 1000-5000 content on the matter that will also point out some considerations my competitors dont really cover. My challenge is I cant see how this can be broken into sub topics without having thin supporting content. It's my understanding that I should create these in order to inner link and have a shot at ranking. In thinking about my topic I feel like the supporting posts can only be so long. Furthermore, my three niches within my small overall niche search for short but different keywords. Seems I am struggling to put it all into words. Let me stop here with a question - is it bad to have one category in a website? If not I feel like this would solve my dilemma in making a good site map and content plan. it is possible to split my main topic into 3 categories. I heard somewhere you shouldn't inner link posts from different categories. Problem is if I dont it's not ideal for the user experience as the topics really arent that different. Example a military member might be researching his/her own life insurance and be curious about his spouses coverage. In order to satisfy this user's experience and increase the time on my site I should link to where they can find more dept on their spouses coverage which would be in a different category. Is this still acceptable since it's really not a different subject?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | insuretheheroes.com0 -
How old is 404 data from Google Search Console?
I was wondering how old the 404 data from Google Search Console actually is? Does anyone know over what kind of timespan their site 404s data is compiled over? How long do the 404s tend to take to disappear from the Google Search Console, once they are fixed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Same content, different languages. Duplicate content issue? | international SEO
Hi, If the "content" is the same, but is written in different languages, will Google see the articles as duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chalet
If google won't see it as duplicate content. What is the profit of implementing the alternate lang tag?Kind regards,Jeroen0 -
Bypassing Google, Data Highlighter and Webmaster tools
eLLo! Has anyone used Data Highlighter? I've had colleagues mentioning a jump in CTR after using the data highlighter on pages. Thought I'll do the same and went into my webmaster tools but I've hit a brick wall. Whenever I highlight a product page, my country selector pops up and I'm unable to highlight a product page. A colleague of mine mentioned to bypass google by basing it on user agent, this will allow you to avoid the country selector. But if I bypass Google, wouldn't it affect Google Analytics, Indexing etc?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Websites with same content
Hi, Both my .co.uk and .ie websites have the exact same content which consists of hundreds of pages, is this going to cause an issue? I have a hreflang on both websites plus google webmaster tools is picking up that both websites are targeting different counties. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Unsure where Google has sourced this inaccurate Product Data
Hi, This is a slightly odd one I was hoping someone could shed some light on. One of our staff just did a Google search and located these listings on Google UK Product Search: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ink+cartridges&hl=en&sa=X&biw=1074&bih=499&tbm=shop&prmd=imvns#q=ink+cartridges&hl=en&sa=X&tbs=store:3287803270081455254&tbm=shop&prmd=imvns&ei=xp5pUP6uN8i_0QXUuoHADQ&ved=0CI0BEMcMMAE&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=333b49ec245f6031&biw=1074&bih=499 Do you happen to have any idea where Google is getting this regionalised data from and in particular the pricing which is incorrect? We have a Google (UK) Product Feed however the prices given are different than those being displayed in this localised search. Additionally the product feed that we supply relates to our main website and not a specific store. If you click through to compare prices from multiple merchants you'll see our prices being listed correctly under our company name and website rather than the incorrect pricing attributed to a specific store. I have checked our Google Places Account and our Google Product Feed Account but I just can't figure out where this data and incorrect pricing is coming from and indeed why it only affects our physical stores and not the more generalised website pricing. If someone could point me in the right direction so I can get this corrected I’d appreciate it! Many thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Looking for an open source way to host product reviews...
We currently use power reviews for our item reviews but want to move towards something that can be hosted internally and thus forgo the cost or power reviews and actually see user generated content play a role in our site. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichealGooden0