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
-
Where to order content?
I have a number of clients struggling with publishing frequent blog content. Can anyone recommend any content ordering services? - I've seen Constant Content and a couple of others. I'm just wondering if these are effective?, SEO-friendly? (completely safe from duplication, etc.)? - and if anyone can recommend the best choices based on experience. In the past clients I've been fortunate in working with clients who are writing themselves, or connecting with a copywriter and going through the process of creating content. However I'm looking for an alternative solution to solve content drought with some clients which simply don't have the time to go through that process and need to see results.
Content Development | | GregDixson0 -
Duplicate Content for Non-SEO Purposes
Duplicate Content for Non-SEO Purposes There are a few layers to this question, but at the most basic level the question is... -Will having the same article (in the form of archived e-newsletter issues) on multiple different websites' newsletter archives HURT those sites? I'm fairly sure it won't HELP any of them in terms of SEO, but will having these back issues of their e-newsletters archived on their websites get them penalized? For the purpose of this question, these are not clients we are doing SEO for, just hosting and their e-newsletters. So it's fine if the archives provide no SEO benefit, we just don't want to leave them up if they will become LIABILITIES for the websites. -If having the same article in archived issues of e-newsletters on multiple different websites WOULD be harmful, would moving these archives to a sub-domain change anything or would it be best to simply take the archives down altogether? -Alternately, would spinning these articles make any difference in whether or not these sites get penalized? -Lastly, would spinning make the articles usable for archived e-newsletters for clients that ARE signed on for SEO services? I have a hunch about this, but I'd love to hear your expert opinions. Thanks!
Content Development | | BrianAlpert780 -
Content Syndication Service
Am curious to get the forum's opinion on content syndication services like SYNND . Has anyone tried them or any other content syndication networks. Does the forum have any recommendations for good quality syndication networks that can be used to distribute content to quality sources.
Content Development | | SEO5Team0 -
Is this dulplicate content causing me problems
Hi, i am going to try and explain this as best as possible as i am not used to working with k2 that much. What i have as an example is a page which is here http://www.in2town.co.uk/Cheap-Flights-Ryanair-News This page is news about ryanair now because i am working in joomla and i am working with k2, and i am also making each landing page a front page, i am having problems. For people who do not use joomla i will explain. For the ryanair page which is a front page, i have to make a category and that category for all my content to go into is called ryaniar-news. Now i have the page above which is for ryanair news but the problem i have got is, because i have a category it brings up all the content as a blog format. so for example here is the category section in blog format. http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/ryaniar-news Now i have managed to make sure that the articles are not showing but it brings up the title of the pages and i am worried that this will be seen as duplicate content and will damage the main page of http://www.in2town.co.uk/Cheap-Flights-Ryanair-News I may have set everything up wrong i am not sure but if i have i would be glad if someone can tell me the right way to do it. I do not like the blog format and that is why i use a front page set up so i can have my layout the way i want it. Can anyone please explain if my set up will damage the main ryanair news page or what i need to do to sort it out please.
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Help with Content Revamp
Many years ago we wrote about 60 content pages for our surfboard e-commerce website targeting all the top popular keywords. Many of them generic but very keyword focused. We are now revamping our content our our site and want to move away from the generic side of things and actually rewrite all the pages to make them very useful and actually stuff our customers can really use and will find very helpful. I noticed that many times we wrote small pages less than 500 words that target similar keywords around a general theme. In looking at the analytics all the pages are getting a good amount of traffic and ranking well but im wondering would it be ok to focus on a main topic and combine similar pages if they are related? So i can take the say 60 articles and combine it down to say 10 articles and make the articles cover alot more stuff instead of just being small 500 word articles. As an example we have many surfboard models so we wrote an article for -Longboard Surfboards -Funboard Surfboards -Mini Malibu Surfboards -Retro Fish Surfboards -Womens Surfboards -Beginner Surfboards My question is could i weave these all together and write one long guide on say "Choosing The Type of Surboard you need" and cover all the board models in that article and then redirect the old pages to point to that one article. Would i still rank well for all these words Or would this destroy all my current rankings for these words? What is the best approach to rewriting and or combining old content pages that currently rank well but could be combined with others around the same theme to make it more user friendly?
Content Development | | isle_surf0 -
Integration of content on other sites
(by Google Traductor) Hello, we are able to make agreements with sites of good quality and reputation to integrate our classified ads for agropeuariosector on the websites of these companies. We fear that thesesites begin to index all this content and begin to compete with us in organic positioning. On the other hand this would generateduplicate content? That strategy will be applied in order to do so. Greetings and thanks!
Content Development | | romaro
Robert0 -
Define: Good Content
I am curious to hear what you guys consider to be the characteristics of good content and in which order if you have a preference. Here are a few I can think of: Informative (you can learn something new) Substantial (enough of it and thorough) Complete (doesn't give half-baked information or ideas) Unique (not regurgitated original content) Helpful (practical actionable information) Visual (content complemented by media) Referenced (claims made are substantiated through citations) Entertaining (or otherwise emotional, e.g. surprising, sad, shocking, controversial) Formatted (easy to read and follow) Timely (right content at the right time, applies for news) Professional (writing style, grammar, spelling and sentence structure) Can you add to this list?
Content Development | | Dan-Petrovic1 -
Best way to avoid duplicate content issues here.
I am planning to write an article that refutes some claims made in another article. The original article is a 20 page pdf. What I plan to do is to take quotes from this PDF and then under each quote write my arguments for or against the quote. If I take direct quotes from the article, is Google likely to see this as duplicate content?
Content Development | | MarieHaynes0