UGC News articles
-
Hi! Quick question regarding UGC...
On our site - http://designrfix.com - we have a /news section (which contains about 40 000 news items) - shown in the right sidebar at the bottom
I recently changed the /news (and all subpages) section to noindex and asked a removal on Google Webmaster Tools... was this a good idea? Those pages are low content pages and the bounce rate is really high since all articles are external sites.
-
Thanks for sharing that.
I have thought about opening our news to visitor submissions. Right now we do it all ourselves (about eight to ten items per day).
I worry that visitors will submit a lot of spam and self-promotion that will decrease our quality. If weeding takes a few hours per day then we are better off doing it inhouse.
Thanks again for sharing.
-
Great thanks again,
We get between 40 and 50+ per day and yes i take the time to weed out all the spam, which is almost always 1/3rd of submissions. quite time consuming. (a few hours a day)
-
I've put back the /news items as "noindex, follow" and as well as some internal links.
Yes. I think that is an improvement.
ps. All of our external links are nofollow.
I didn't realize that. Good idea on a blog where users can submit items.
pps. I had to put some disallow rules in our robots.txt to remove the news category and pages. I'm guessing i still have to keep those rules in place correct?
I allow the category pages on my blog to be indexed. They bring in thousands of visitors per day.
Last question... would you also keep pagination as "noindex, follow" or open it all up?
On my sites the pagination is noindex follow.
A couple questions for you...
Do you receive a lot of user submitted news items?
Do you think that you get a lot of spam submissions? How much time do you have to spend weeding the spam?
-
Thanks EGOL!
I've put back the /news items as "noindex, follow" and as well as some internal links.
ps. All of our external links are nofollow.
pps. I had to put some disallow rules in our robots.txt to remove the news category and pages. I'm guessing i still have to keep those rules in place correct?Last question... would you also keep pagination as "noindex, follow" or open it all up?
-
I have a similar section on one of my sites and I believe that it was part of a Panda problem in one of the early Panda updates. I used noindex / follow on those pages and the site recovered in a few weeks.
On that site I have about 150 category pages and they pull in a ton of traffic.
Your posts seem to include some UGC and they appear to be receiving followed links. Perhaps linking to bad neighborhoods is an important concern.... and a lot of your internal links are nofollowed. If this was my site all of the internal links would be followed and the external UGC links would be nofollowed.
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
-
Best structure for a news website including main menu nav
Just looking for thoughts and opinions on the best way to set up the main nav on a news website that covers a specific professional services sector. There are news items, archived news, blog, events, but also main menu links to the numerous news categories that go to a page listing the news articles under that category (as created in Wordpress when publishing the article). I'm thinking that having these off the main nav is diluting the juice to the more important pages including the events and the news page? Just thinking about how to rearrange and consolidate. Any thoughts on how people would structure something like this?
On-Page Optimization | | sam_legmark0 -
How can I redirect anything after the article url to main article?
Hello everyone, When someone visits my websites article like http://www.website.com/article-title/lol , it give to 404 page error. But when someone http://www.website.com/article-title/ , it shows the article. The word "lol" can be changed to anything. I would like that to be redirected to the main article. Example: Someone visits website.com/article-title/lol, they should be redirected to website.com/article-title/ Is it possible to do so? If yes, please tell me how. Note: I'm using WordPress Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | hakhan2011 -
Best Way To Pass Rank To Follow Up Article?
What is the best way to pass rank to a follow-up article? For example, we write an article "Product A Rumors" that ends up ranking #1. When Product A is released, we write an article called "Product A Review". What is the best way to pass rank from the first pre-release article to the second post-release article? We don't want to do a simple 301 redirect as we want readers to be able to go back to the first article to see the progression of the Product A life-cycle. Also, should we go back and edit the old article to add a link to the new? Should we add a link in the new article to the old? Thanks in advance 😉
On-Page Optimization | | Humanovation0 -
What to do with 40 short articles to make room for 5 good thorough ones
Hello, On my life coaching website, I have 40 articles that I want to replace with 5 good ones (to get up-to-date in modern content writing). The new articles will be long, thorough, and graphically stimulating. What do I do with all these old short articles. There's no backlinks on them, but they are gaining a little traffic. I'm not sure I want them around since they're not high quality enough. What's normally done?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
New Articles and Posts - what key word to focus on?
I have a few pages on my site focused on key words...such as office design Birmingham. The contact page and a tag page. http:www.businessinteriors.co.uk/tag/office-design-birmingham/ Now I recently published an article about a big new office design in birmingham for a company....and I tagged it as office design birmingham naturally...put it in the category for Birmingham office news....and then also put office design Birmingham at key strategic seo points.... the result being this article now seems to rank higher than my office design Birmingham pages?! My question is this....how should I optimise posts? Lets say I put 3 or 4 posts on my webiste/blog about an "office design Birmingham"....I dont want to rank for "HSBC office design birmingham"....I want the article to lend weight to my office design Birmingham credentials ...so I focus on office design birmingham? I dont really want my posts to rank very high though...I want them to help my key pages "float". I'm very confused how to optimise my posts. If I do it too well, they out rank the "old" pages that I actually want people to visit?! Mmm, thanks for pointers!
On-Page Optimization | | bizint0 -
Is it better to embed my longtail article or give it a separate url?
Within my e-commerce site I have jewelers who using uncommon techniques and maetrials. I have a few long tail type article ready to publish about these niche topics. My site navigation has each jeweler as a category with their often changing products within their category. I am thinking I would add an article to the artist-category content. But in the past, I have put "how to" or "what is" content in an article section of the site. This way I could link to it from several places. With the long tail in mind, would I be better off adding the article to the jeweler's category page? If I have a 2nd jeweler using this same technique, I am thinking I would rewrite the 1st article including different long tail phrases. Thank You for Helping- Handcrafter
On-Page Optimization | | stephenfishman0 -
What Drupal 7 module for SEO, or if not what other SEO software for article writing does anyone recommend?
what Drupal 7 module for SEO article writing optimization, analyzation does anyone recommend? Thanks in advance. We are updating our sites and need this information. If hter is not a Drupal module what else would you recommend?
On-Page Optimization | | alternativelaw0 -
Articles on our own site?
Hi Guy's Is it better to have articles on our own website under a news section, with keyword phrases that point to relevant pages or is it better to post them on our blog (that is seperate, we use blogger) and point them to relevant pages on our site? or maybe a bit of both? Thanks Daniel
On-Page Optimization | | LushDuck0