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
-
Schema.org Article, itemprop keyword, what is it?
I've wanted to know the answer to this for a couple of years now and haven't found anyone ever talking about it. So here goes ... For schema.org markup on articles, http://schema.org/Article there's an itemprop for keywords: http://schema.org/keywords keywords
On-Page Optimization | | SteveRDM
Canonical URL: http://schema.org/keywords
Keywords or tags used to describe this content. Multiple entries in a keywords list are typically delimited by commas. What's that do? Like if I use that markup with an article I publish on my site, will that get those words given that property keyword value? Will that affect SEO value? Do those replace what metatag keywords used to be? Or are they just like what metatag keywords are these days, no real value?0 -
Google search returns blog homepage, but not article
When I do a google search for a specific article on our blog the search results only return the blog homepage with the article title shown in the meta description, but never the actual article page. I've tried to refine my search by using site: and quotation marks around the article title (e.g site:www.example.com "article title") but still only get the homepage. Our blog is showing up so I assume it's not an indexing issue, but not sure how to get the article pages to show on serps. Any ideas? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | STP_SEO0 -
1500 words per post * 10 posts vs 15000 words in one article, which is best for SEO?
If you don't have any problems with Text/HTML ratio. Which one do you prefer for better results? With reasons of possible, thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | Eslam-yosef0 -
Meta keywords and meta news keywords
I've got a question regarding this. So normally Meta keywords it is not relevant and we shouldn't use them, however there are opinions that we can use them as these are signals for other Search Engines. Meta news keywords - are ok to be used in the news sites. what is your opinion on using both of them on a news site? Can this help, or harm? thanks, Irina
On-Page Optimization | | InformMedia0 -
Do a lot of related articles in lower subfolders, boost higher level subfolder keywords?
For instance www.example1.com/cooltopic/ has 5 ‘verycool articles’ under /cooltopic/ www.example1.com/cooltopic/verycool-article1/ , www.example1.com/cooltopic/verycool-article2/. On www.example2.com/cooltopic/ there are 100 ‘verycool articles’ Who will rank above the other for the term ‘cooltopic’ in the SERPS? Is it www.example1.com with 5 ‘verycool articles’ or www.example2.com with 100 ‘verycool articles’. Or does the quantity of (theme related) articles in subfolders not matter? And what if example1.com has more quality external links from the ‘awesome community’. Would this change a lot in the rankings? Or what if both domains have 0 external links, but example2.com has 95 more internal links (from the articles) to /cooltopic/ than example1.com with only 5 articles.
On-Page Optimization | | PrizeWize0 -
Article on site and distribution, is it duplicate content?
I was always taught to place all original articles on site, let them get indexed by Google, then put out for distribution through various press release outlets. With the latest penguin update, how does this practice work out concerning duplicate content? In theory, I wrote the article so I should get credit for it on my site first, then push through various distribution outlets to get it out to my targeted audience in my niche field. Typing out loud I would tend to think if the article is on my site first then I would get credit and any others following would be hit by duplicate content if in fact google considered it a dupe violation. Any input on this? Am I on track or am I heading for a train wreck.
On-Page Optimization | | anthonytjm0 -
Better to update or add articles?
Hi, We have an online gift store and we write new blogs every year. Question is, if we already had a blog that's called 'Top Valentine Gifts' from last year,should we update the blog content with the most updated data, or should we add a new blog called 'Top Valentine Gifts 2012' and rename the old one to 'Top Valentine Gifts 2011' (and 301 redirect the old URL)? Which one is more beneficial in terms of SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | Essentia0 -
Main landing page does not rank as good a single news article - why?
We are running several special interest websites in the German speaking market, covering outdoor sports and vacation topics. We are trying to focus on one main landing page for events and keywords, this should be number one für search engines. Besides we are producing numerous content (news, pictures, videos), which are supposed to rank well and to be found on Google News, but not to rank higher for the specific keyword than our designated landing page. It seems, that we fail with this attempt. Example one: The main page for the alpine Ski World Championships on our skiing portal www.skiinfo.de was supposed to be this one: http://magazin.skiinfo.de/3170--ski_wm_2011_garmisch-partenkirchen.html for the Keywords 'ski wm 2011' in Germany. We missed this goal. Many of our own news articles ranked higher. When searching for 'ski wm 2011' on skiinfo.de only directly after the World Championships, the main page was ranked on 33rd position - 32 of our own articles ranked higher. Why does the landing page rank worse than an article like this: http://magazin.skiinfo.de/3173-ski-wm-2011-tina-maze-gewinnt-riesenslalom-keine-deutschen-medaillen.html ? Another example: Our designated landing page for the Event 'International Mountain Summit' (a major mountaineering and climbing event in Bressanone/ITA) is this: http://www.bergleben.de/klettern/2148--international_mountain_summit.html (Keywords: international mountain summit, IMS). We are experiencing that our news articles rank higher, when they are 'fresh', this one still does: http://www.bergleben.de/klettern/2149-international-mountain-summit-4.html. Why? It would be perfect, if good content would strengthen the designated landing page. We are linking back to this landing page from each article in the breadcrumb, but this does not seem to be very successful. How can we achieve this?
On-Page Optimization | | Beatbuster0