Will Google start trimming 'stale' sites rank?
-
With the recent focus on Google to reduce rank of farms and low value sites, I am interested to get SEO view on if you think Google will start devaluing stale sites. I do find it a bit frustrating that in the top 5 for my main key phrase, there is one site that has NO content just an error and another blog that has not updated content in 2 years.
How can blogs that do not blog be considered high enough value by Google to rank in the top 5?
How can sites that just return 404 or 500 for ALL their pages be even considered a site let alone rank 2nd.
I am interested so see others experiences and thoughts on 'user experience' clean ups by Google and why these types of sites get missed?
-
We have been producing lots of content, being active in forums and getting good links for strong sites in our marketting area and the site has shot from 100+ to 50, 30, 25, 12, 12, 12. There we are stuck at the moment, so I guess we have to do the next round of improvements and get better content out there. Thanks for the advice Egol & Alan
-
How can blogs that do not blog be considered high enough value by Google to rank in the top 5?
How can sites that just return 404 or 500 for ALL their pages be even considered a site let alone rank 2nd.
You can work really hard to get above them or you can wait for Google to devalue these pages.
Those are your choices.
But if google devalues those pages and drops them you will still be in position #9. I say that you still have a lot of work to do. .
Now.... Let's say that you rank #3 with the error page and stale page above you. I bet that you will be in good position because people who check #1 and #2 will be delighted when they find you at #3.
Start working to get #3.
I see stale blogs and error pages above me once in a while. I ask myself... "Does that stale blog have kickass content?"... if it does I respect it... and... "Does that site with the 404's have a lot of kickass links?" .... if it does then I worry that they will discover the problem and fix it - and I will have a real competitor.
Consider this approach.... Look at all of those sites above you and decide to create content for this KW that puts all of them to shame. Blow them out of the water with a great article, an interactive, a video, a cartoon, statistical analysis or better yet a big page with several of these. Toss that up, forget about it, don't even linkbuild, come back in a year to check. I bet you will be surprised with the results. (If you want faster results tell a couple of influential bloggers in your niche who regularly point to new content about what you have created - but that could pull in competitors.)
-
there could be many reasons - if you're in position 12, that's not just 1 site ahead of you - that's 11. That tells me you have many other things to work on since it's so many sites ahead of you for that
-
I really hope it is part of their plan as the do keep pushing 'improve the user experience'. How do you compete against a 10 year old site, moz DR 57? Even when it has been idle for two year it still holds position 3.
The keyphrase we are tragetting heavely still only gets us to #12 and there 1 stale and 1 dead on page 1 - doh!
I have even tried to buy the dead domain, but even the email for the owner is dead.
-
slowly but surely, one step at a time, they work to deal with all the garbage. As much as I too hate that kind of site showing up in the results, it's likely that there's much less of that out there than these other things they've been targeting. However I don't know and haven't done any kind of study on that.
In other words, I really hope they already plan on getting to it and just haven't yet. Otherwise I'm going to scream. Again.
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
-
Whats (Other) traffic in Google Analytics?
When I look through all our clients, a few are receiving the majority of their traffic from (other). [ Acquisition > Channels > (Other) ]. The only option in (other) is "website" or "offline", whatever that may be. And even weirder, the avg session duration is 0:00. Any idea what this may be?
Reporting & Analytics | | W2GITeam0 -
Hey guys, any advice on why my 'search analytics' in Google Webmaster tools is blank with no data?
I have added all the website versions into Google web master tools and I have no crawl errors. When I click on Search traffic these pages are blank - search analytics, & Mobile usability. And When I fetch as Google the status is constantly saying me 'temporarily unreachable' - any help would be greatly appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | HLAS0 -
Referral Data Q's
1. We recently ran a promotion on both FB and Reddit, which is https, linking to our non-https site. We utilized UTM links to our landing page. Our GA campaign data returned extremely low hits in comparison to what we actually received (and recorded via FB/Reddit dashboard). Obviously our Direct traffic spiked during these times, caused by a secure to nonsecure referral, I'm sure. I'm also noticing a spike in referral traffic from lm.facebook.com that correlates to the ad times. Does this mean Facebook's link shim is stripping away my UTM data? My question is why we receive SOME properly UTM-tagged referral traffic in our campaigns? What's allowing some of it to go through? 2. I've tagged our email signature links with UTM as well, hoping to clean up some of our Direct traffic. I understand that external clients like Outlook and Thunderbird likely won't pass referral data, but do hosted clients like Gmail, Yahoo, and such? And if so, would the https to http difference obstruct this again? I'd love some insight onto these questions, especially if I'm off the mark with a few of my assumptions there.
Reporting & Analytics | | kirmeliux0 -
Misconfigured event tracker on a site
I'm on the case to diagnose an unnaturally low bounce rate, as in under 2%. Yes, the site has two Universal analytics tags, but Google says that would not compromise data (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032400?hl=en). So I am trying to figure out how to look at event tracking to see if there is a configuration error. But, I am not a developer so am unsure how to review and would welcome the help of the Moz community. The site is http://corsa.com if you wish to take a peek. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | butler_emily0 -
Why doesn't Google seem to care about referral spam?
In researching the issue of referral spam, there is no shortage if info, both on MOZ and beyond. But, neither the Google Analytics Blog or Help Forums seem to mention the issue at all. I'd think it is something that they would want to get rid of, yet it seems like they don't even acknowledge that it exists. Anyone have insights into this? Am I missing something, or is Google strangely silent on an issue that is becoming more and more annoying for anyone trying to use GA data?
Reporting & Analytics | | irapasternack1 -
My GA code is on my site but Google Analytics isn't being pulled into SEOMoz...why?
The CEO wants me to present an SEO plan next week for three of our sites; however, I got this message when I went to campaign overview tab: "It appears there's a problem with our connection to your Google Analytics account. Please go to your Settings page to update your connection." I double-checked the GA code and it's the same on both our site and in SEOMoz...what gives? I clicked on Choose Your GA Profile->Set GA Account and Profile then got this warning: "Are you sure you want to change your Google Analytics connection? Changing your connection will reset our cache of your historical GA traffic data." I need this data pronto so I can set strategy for three sites; any help would be greatly appreciated! Darrell
Reporting & Analytics | | AdviceElle0 -
Tracing Google Analytics 'goal' back to original search phrase
I added Goals to my Google Analytics tracking. It's working; I get visitors who have completed Goals showing up in the reporting. My question is: Is it possible to trace backwards from a completed Goal to the original search phrase a user entered in Google to come to my site (for those who entered from Google.com via organic search result)? I'm trying to answer the question of which search phrases are resulting in completed Goals (as opposed to bouncing off the site or just any behaviour other than completing a Goal). It seems like this should be one of Analytics' default reports -- help identify which search phrases are converting well. It's probably there and I'm just not seeing it... Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | scanlin0 -
How to change a url for google analytics account
We recently changed the url of a client's website. Is there a way to change the url on the ga account instead of creating a new account so that we don't lose comparative data? Thanks! Sorry- I know this is a novice question.
Reporting & Analytics | | marketing12340