Adding more content to an old site
-
We have a site which was de-moted from PR4 to PR3 with the latest Google update. We have not done any SEO for a long time for the site and the content is the same with over 100 page.
My question is, in order to update the site, which is the best to do it, do we:
1. re-introduced new content to replace old once
2. re-write old content
3. Add new pages
Many thanks in advance.
-
Is your site verified in Google Webmaster Tools, and Bing's Webmaster Tools? If not, get it verified, then look at your account. There's a wealth of information there, including any notices from the search engines about anything they find that might be suspect (Google now even sends a note for buying/selling links), and you can get some better statistics about your site when it's verified.
I would first look in your webmaster tools, and see if the engines have flagged anything for you. If so, then you know what to work on first.
Second, step back and think about what purpose your website has for your business, is it meeting that purpose, and what are useful metrics for you.
In May, Matt Cutts did a video response to a person asking why toolbar PR isn't updated more frequently (available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ9pFUSVG9g) and mentioned that while they internally keep a close eye on correct PR, they're not as worried about what shows up in the toolbar. They have some flags if something with super-high PR goes down to super-low PR in the toolbar, but a move from 4 to 3 doesn't fall under that.
So, it's probably good to be thinking about your site, but think beyond the toolbar PR.
-
I never really bothered to check any other metric up untill I came to this forum. Our keyword ranking has dropped slightly in the past few months but we don't really depend much on site traffic to generate income as the business already has regular feed of businesses using our services.
-
Google's homepage recently went from a toolbar pagerank 10 to a toolbar pagerank 9. What are your other metrics like? Has your organic traffic from Google changed in the six months? Toolbar PR is just one indication of how Google views your site, and is on that is infrequently updated and not totally accurately reported to the user, and is several weeks old by the time it is published.
-
Hi Seomagnet, If you have been demoted there may be black hat criteria on your website, have a good look at your on-site optimization and backlink strength before adding fresh content. If you are determined this is due to old content by all means write some more pages but I would personally start with on-site then off-site then building the website bigger.
-
You could have been right on the cusp with your original PR4 and lost just enough links to turn the reading back to PR3. One thing to check would be 404 errors, fixing and redirecting any that you possibly can, and seeing where you're getting links (or links from the past) and creating new pages that would be well received in that segment.
-
Thanks for that, we are about to introduce a blog into the site, but was a bit unsure of our existing content which for some is by now is out of date...
-
Of these 3 options you laid out I would recommend adding new pages. You can always find other content about your company/services/products that is not posted on your website and recycle it to a degree. Have you guys ever thought about implementing a blog into the website. As far as a great user friendly way to continue to product content a blog is great.
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
-
Duplicate content question...
I have a high duplicate content issue on my website. However, I'm not sure how to handle or fix this issue. I have 2 different URLs landing to the same page content. http://www.myfitstation.com/tag/vegan/ and http://www.myfitstation.com/tag/raw-food/ .In this situation, I cannot redirect one URL to the other since in the future I will probably be adding additional posts to either the "vegan" tag or the "raw food tag". What is the solution in this case? Thank you
Technical SEO | | myfitstation0 -
Fixing up poorly performing eCommerce SIte with content? First things first..
I had a small site that was performing well enough for me for 6 years--nice source of extra family income. It was a very out of date platform (1990's) and I moved it to Big Commerce in December. Since then visits and sales have just plummeted. It has died and I am sad. I want to remain positive. It's a viable niche product line, I have tons of quality inventory, my site platform is current. I am a good writer and am willing to add content if it will help. From what I can determine apart from technical issues I may not know about I think I suffer from THIN CONTENT. I want to pretend I'm opening a new business and start over in today's environment. I have had bad experiences with two SEO consultants (one ripped me off financially, the other gave me advice that hurt me) so I have no choice but to educate myself. I got started in ecommerce back in 1998 with the help of many wonderful kind people on forums so I'm turning to this resource once again. What would you do first if you were me especially to get some revenue flowing asap? I need help. I need to know if there is hope or if I should liquidate at the nearest swap meet 😉 Thanks! decorativedishes.net
Technical SEO | | ddktt1 -
Taking descriptions from Manufacturer sites and Duplicate content
We are doing some inventory improvements eg new photographs from various angles, etc. We are also writing descriptions for each product.. As one of our suppliers has perfect desriptions on their site what is the theory on how duplicate content will affect our ranking for these products if we copy and paste? Also if we change the descriptions, just how different do they need to be? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley1 -
Duplicate Footer Content
A client I just took over is having some duplicate content issues. At the top of each page he has about 200 words of unique content. Below this is are three big tables of text that talks about his services, history, etc. This table is pulled into the middle of every page using php. So, he has the exact same three big table of text across every page. What should I do to eliminate the dup content. I thought about removing the script then just rewriting the table of text on every page... Is there a better solution? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BigStereo0 -
Are aggregate sites penalised for duplicate page content?
Hi all,We're running a used car search engine (http://autouncle.dk/en/) in Denmark, Sweden and soon Germany. The site works in a conventional search engine way with a search form and pages of search results (car adverts).The nature of car searching entails that the same advert exists on a large number of different urls (because of the many different search criteria and pagination). From my understanding this is problematic because Google will penalize the site for having duplicated content. Since the order of search results is mixed, I assume SEOmoz cannot always identify almost identical pages so the problem is perhaps bigger than what SEOmoz can tell us. In your opinion, what is the best strategy to solve this? We currently use a very simple canonical solution.For the record, besides collecting car adverts AutoUncle provide a lot of value to our large user base (including valuations on all cars) . We're not just another leech adword site. In fact, we don't have a single banner.Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | JonasNielsen0 -
Duplicate Content - Mobile Site
We think that a mobile version of our site is causing a duplicate content issue; what's the best way to stop the mobile version being indexed. Basically the site forwards mobile users to "/mobile" which is just a mobile optimised version of the original site. Is it best to block the /mobile folder from being crawled?
Technical SEO | | nsmith7870 -
I have 2 websites with the same content
Hello everyone, this is my first post here on SEOmoz and I have a questions that I cannot seem to figure out. So here is my scenario: I have 2 websites that are identical. The only difference between the 2 websites is the domain name. This was done a while back for marketing purposes, however, I am no longer needing my 2nd website. What is the best way to get rid of this second website? I still have about 1 paying customer a day convert on this 2nd website and I do not want to loose them, however, I know that I am getting penalized by the search engines because of this duplicate content. Please let me know the best way of going about this. PS: I have read about 301 redirects, canonicalizing URLs, and other methods but do not know which one to choose. Any help is greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | threebiz0 -
Should you worry about adding geo-targeted pages to your site?
Post-Panda, should I worry about adding a bunch of geo-targeted landing pages at once? It's a community, people have added their location on their profile pages. I'm worried if we decide to make all the locations into hyperlinks that point to new geo-targeted pages, it could get us extra traffic for those geo-specific keyword phrases but penalize the site as a whole for having so many low-quality pages. What I'm thinking is maybe to start small and turn, say, United States into a hyperlink that points to a page (that would house our community members that reside in the United States) and add extra unique content to the page. And only add a new location page when we know we'll be adding unique content to it, so it's not basically just page sorting. Thoughts? Hope that makes sense. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | poolguy0