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
-
Content From API - Remove or to Redirect ?
Hi Guys,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaddyM556
I am working on a site at the moment,
Previous developer used a API to pull in HealthCare content (HSE) .
So the API basically generates landing pages within the site, and generates the content.
To date it has over 2k in pages being generated.
Some actually rank organically and some don't. New site being launch: So a new site is being launched & the "health advice" where this content used to live be not included in the new site. So this content will not have a place to be displayed. My Query: Would you allow the old content die off in the migration process & just become 404's
Or
Would you 301 redirect the all or only ranking pages to the homepage ? Other considerations, site will be moved to https:// so site will be submitted to search console & re-indexed by Google. Would love to hear if anyone had similar situation or suggestions.
Best Regards
Pat0 -
May Faceted Navigation via ajax #parameter cause duplicated content issues?
We are going to implement a faceted navigation for an ecommerce site of about 1000 products.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Faceted navigation is implemented via ajax/javascript which adds to the URL a large number of #parameters.
Faceted pages are canonicalizing to page without any parameters. We do not want google to index any of the faceted pages at this point. Will google include pages with #parameters in their index?
Can I tell google somehow to ignore #parameters and not to index them?
Could this setup cause any SEO problems for us in terms of crawl bandwidth and or link equity?0 -
Responsive Content
At the moment we are thinking about switching to another CMS. We are discussing the use of responsive content.Our developer states that the technique uses hidden content. That is sort of cloaking. At the moment I'm searching for good information or tests with this technique but I can't find anything solid. Do you have some experience with responsive content and is it cloaking? Referring to good articles is also a plus. Looking forward to your answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maxaro.nl0 -
Does Google see this as duplicate content?
I'm working on a site that has too many pages in Google's index as shown in a simple count via a site search (example): site:http://www.mozquestionexample.com I ended up getting a full list of these pages and it shows pages that have been supposedly excluded from the index via GWT url parameters and/or canonicalization For instance, the list of indexed pages shows: 1. http://www.mozquestionexample.com/cool-stuff 2. http://www.mozquestionexample.com/cool-stuff?page=2 3. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?page=3 4. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?mq_source=q-and-a 5. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?type=productss&sort=1date Example #1 above is the one true page for search and the one that all the canonicals reference. Examples #2 and #3 shouldn't be in the index because the canonical points to url #1. Example #4 shouldn't be in the index, because it's just a source code that, again doesn't change the page and the canonical points to #1. Example #5 shouldn't be in the index because it's excluded in parameters as not affecting page content and the canonical is in place. Should I worry about these multiple urls for the same page and if so, what should I do about it? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Need help with Google Webmaster Tools Errors
I have a lots of error on my Google webmaster tools under Search Appearance -> Structure Data there are two sets of items 1- "hentry" and source is "Markup: microformats.org" and error says: "Missing: author | Missing: updated" 2-"hcard" and source is "Markup: microformats.org" and error says: "Missing: fn" I am using WordPress. Can anybody tell me how to fix these errors please. Thank you Sina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SinaKashani1 -
E-commerce store, in need of protecting our own content
Dear other Moz fans, We have an E-commerce store in Norway. Our main conversion to sale still happens in our physical store, but do to the description and information we provide online.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Monica_Flirt
To warn you before you click; Our store is a boutique for "erotic items". A nice one how ever, made buy woman for woman and their man. We use enormous time writing descriptions and information for (almost) every item online.
We really want to protect our content (text information). What is the best practice to mark up "protection" of our hard work content? Thank you for your time.
Regards form the Flirt girls in Norway.0 -
Is this ok for content on our site?
We run a printing company and as an example the grey box (at the bottom of the page) is what we have on each page http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html We used to use this but tried to get most of the content on the page, but we now want to add a bit more in-depth information to each page. The question i have is - would a 1200 word document be ok in there and not look bad to Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Is there a way to contact Google besides the google product forum?
Our traffic from google has dropped more than 35% and continues to fall. We have been on this forum and google's webmaster forum trying to get help. We received great advice, have waited months, but instead of our traffic improving, it has worsened. We are being penalized by google for many keywords such as trophies, trophies and awards and countless others - we were on page one previously. We filed two reconsideration requests and were told both times that there were no manual penalties. Some of our pages continue to rank well, so it is not across the board (but all of our listings went down a bit). We have made countless changes (please see below). Our busy season was from March to May and we got clobbered. Google, as most people know, is a monopoly when it comes to traffic, so we are getting killed. At first we thought it was Penquin, but it looks like we started getting killed late last year. Lots of unusual things happened - we had a large spike in traffic for two days, then lost our branded keywords, then our main keywords. Our branded keywords came back pretty quickly, but nothing else did. We have received wonderful advice and made most of the changes. We are a very reputable company and have a feeling we are being penalized for something other than spamming. For example, we have a mobile site we added late last year and a wholesale system was added around the same time. Since the date does not coincide with Penquin, we think there is some major technical driver, but have no idea what to do at this point. The webmasters have all been helpful, but nothing is working. We are trying to find out what one does in a situation as we are trying to avoid closing our business. Thank you! Changes Made: 1. We had many crawl errors so we reduced them significantly 2. We had introduced a mobile website in January which we
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards
thought may have been the cause (splitting traffic, duplicate content, etc.),
so we had our mobile provider add the site to their robots.txt file. 3. We were told by a webmaster that their were too many
links from our search provider, so we have them put the search pages in a
robots.txt file. 4. We were told that we had too much duplicate content. This was / is true, as we have hundred of legitate products that are similar:
example trophies and certificates that are virtually the same but are
for different sports or have different colors and sizes. Still, we added more content and added no index tags to many products. We compared our % of dups to competitors and it is far less. 5. At the recommendation of another webmaster, we changed
many pages that might have been splitting traffic. 6. Another webmaster told us that too many people were
linking into our site with the same text, namely Trophy Central and that it
might have appeared we were trying to game the system somehow. We have never bought links and don't even have a webmaster although over the last 10 years have worked with programmers and seo companies (but we don't think any have done anything unusual). 7. At the suggestion of another webmaster, we have tried to
improve our link profile. For example,
we found Yahoo was not linking to our url. 8. We were told to setup a 404 page, so we did 9. We were told to ensure that all of the similar domains
were pointing to www.trophycentral.com/ so we setup redirects 10. We were told that a site that we have linking to us from too many places so we reduced it to 1. Our key pages have A rankings from SEOMOZ for the selected keywords. We have made countless other changes recommended by experts
but have seen no improvements (actually got worse). I am the
president of the company and have made most of the above recent changes myself. Our website is trophycentral.com0