Is it possible to have too much content?
-
Is it possible to have too much content? If so, how do we prove (or at least get evidence) one way or the other to whether we are being adversely affected in the SERPs?
The only way we could think of is to publish a lot less for a week or two, but nobody is willing to risk it.
Numbers wise we are publishing an average of 125 articles a day, with an archive of around 300k fwiw
thanks
-
I try not to read too much into what may lie behind the words of someone's question--I tend to get it wrong if I do : )
But it looks like I may have been on the right path with the quality issue. Penalties are the result of descending down past some unknown quality threshold--on one day a site hadn't yet crossed the threshold, on the next, it had. One should always be thinking of how they may get even "closer to gold", as you say, as that keeps a site positioned better for the future. Note: the correction of the"quality"/"quantity" typo in my original answer.
-
hehe can I take the fifth?
lol. No
If you have any of the following types of content in quantity you can have a problem with Google's Panda algo.
--- lots of pages with small amounts of content - just a few sentences
--- lots of pages that are similar in content from page-to-page, such as service location pages with a few paragraphs and just the name of the geographic location changed
--- lots of pages that have articles that are also published on other domains
--- lots of pages with poor grammar, typos, etc
-
Hi
Read this article from a few weeks ago: http://moz.com/blog/broken-art-of-blogging
This talks about % of comments on a blog.
Your traffic levels seems decent enough. I would then dig deeper and work out the themes that got the most traffic / least traffic and write more based on the areas which get the most traffic.
Shame you cant share the website so I can have a further dig around.
-
How many comments/shares is many? What % should we be chasing?
We're not doing content for SEO, it is intended for readers rather than botbait
and Google Analytics is showing a few million pageviews and month, so the site is not sat unloved, but The Board wants moar traffic! -
Sorry if I was vague, I guess I assumed that since I was posting a question on here, then it was implied that I was unhappy with performance. Are many people on here asking questions about stuff they are happy with?
I am guessing a deep analysis is not something you can teach in a quick forum response
if its not likely to be a quantity issue I guess I need to have thoughts and meetings off line and come back with more specific questions? - I don't have permission to share too many details about the site in question 
-
hehe can I take the fifth?
Seriously though, the new stuff will be closer to gold than crap I think (plus moz reports give us a lot of As) but even hypothetically if it were crap, would 50 tonnes of crap do worse than 5? Or does the stopped clock being correct twice a day come into play? -
it would depends on the length of the articles and the engagement.
Do you get many comments, share reads.
I would rather put out 2 articles a day that got a lot of readership and interactions that 125 that get nothing.
I could only judge if it was too much on the interactions and readership.
Also if you are only producing content for SEO purposes, I would probably stop. Create content your users want to read.
-
Some people have ounces of gold. Some have tons of crap.
Numbers wise we are publishing an average of 125 articles a day
So, are these numbers ounces or tons?
-
Fammy, too much content would not normally be an issue. However, with all that content getting published, it would be worth knowing whether the site is achieving its goals, or at least progressing smartly towards them. If not, then it's possible that the content you're publishing is not accomplishing its purpose and if that's the case, quantity over quality may be at least, one of your issues.
It may also be possible that your emphasis on content creation is not allowing you time to properly organize your archive and you may be missing out on traffic that way. Pausing your content creation wouldn't give you insight on that but deep analysis of your analytics would certainly be helpful.
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
-
Metadata and duplicate content issues
Hi there: I'm seeing a steady decline in organic traffic, but at the same time and increase in pageviews and direct traffic. My site has about 3,000 crawl errors!! Errors are duplicate content, missing description tags, and description too long. Most of these issues are related to events that are being imported from Google calendars via ical and the pages created from these events. Should we block calendar events from being crawled by using the disallow directive in the robots.txt file? Here's the site: https://www.landmarkschool.org/
Reporting & Analytics | | BGR0 -
Tracking links and duplicate content
Hi all, I have a bit of a conundrum for you all pertaining to a tracking link issue I have run into on a clients site. They currently have over duplicate content. Currently, they have over 15,000 pages being crawled (using Screaming Frog) but only 7,000+ are legitimate pages in the sense of they are not duplicates of themselves. The client is using Omniture instead of Google Analytics and using an advanced tracking system on their site for internal and external links (ictids and ectids) in the URL parameters. This is creating thousands of duplicated pages being crawled by Google (as seen on their Search Console and on Screaming Frog). They also are in the middle of moving over from http to https and have thousands of pages currently set up for both, again, creating a duplicate content issue. What I have suggested for the tracking links is setting up a URL parameter in Search Console for these tracking links. I've also suggested they canonical all tracking links to point to the clean page so the pages that have already been indexed point to the correct clean url. Does this seam like the appropriate strategy? Additionally, I've told them before they submit a new sitemap to Google, they need to switch their website over to https to avoid worsening their duplicate content issue. They have not submitted a sitemap to Google Search Console since March 2015. Thank you for any help you can offer!
Reporting & Analytics | | Rydch410 -
Is it possible to have a GA event and a GA virtual pageview fire off of the same click?
If we can only choose one, we'll likely go with the Event, but I'm hoping we'll be able to do both and gather more data about when certain pages (even if they are virtual) are viewed in the path to conversion.
Reporting & Analytics | | KNect3650 -
Fresh Content Still As important?
We have an internal debate, that perhaps y'all can help us resolve. In the past "freshness" of content has been important, correct? (Google's QDF for example) In the past (to present) when we build a site with the intent to SEO the site, we build the core pages with the expectation that we will be adding more site pages as the project progresses, thus settling the "fresh content" factor. But it has been proposed to us, from a client, that completely building the site out with all the pages you hope to rank, getting the upfront bang for your buck. The expectation is that the traffic soars right-off. Now the client says that he has been doing this for years and has not been affected by any alog changes. (although we have not seen proof of this from him) So our question is this: Is it better to provide a website full of fresh content at the beginning of the project, for a jumpstart on traffic, then leave the site alone ( for the most part) or Is it better to have core pages of fresh content at the start, and build out new pages from their, so the website remains fresh every month? And can you prove your argument? (we need cold hard facts to be convinced 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | Britewave0 -
Large content snippets showing up as keywords?
I've started to notice something very strange: the search keywords report in analytics show a bunch of instances where a person copied large snippets of our site content and then pasted it into the search box. Half these searches are coming from the US and half from...India. I'm worried that this may be the sign of a competitor attempting to perform negative SEO on our site (though admittedly I don't know how). Anyone seen anything like this? Advice? Thanks!!
Reporting & Analytics | | SarahLK0 -
Duplicate page content
I'm seeing duplicate page content for tagged URLs. For example:
Reporting & Analytics | | DolbySEO
http://www.dolby.com/us/en/about-us/careers/landing.html
http://www.dolby.com/us/en/about-us/careers/landing.html?onlnk=al-sc as well as PPC campaigns. We tag certain landing pages purposefully in order to understand that traffic comes from these pages, since we use Google Analytics and don't have the abiility to see clickpaths in the package we have. Is there a way to set parameters for crawling to exclude certain pages or tagged content, such as those set up for PPC campaigns?0 -
GA advanced segments - for how much volume keywords are sending per month
I am trying to follow the advice in this whiteboard friday video http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-big-is-your-long-tail-whiteboard-friday of grouping keywords based on volume of traffic they send each month e.g. 100+, 50-99, 10-49, <10. I'm probably being super dumb, but how do I do this with advanced segments in GA? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | KateV0 -
Regex in Analytics for longtail content
I have spent quit some time now, trying to figure this out. I wannt to segment landingoage traffic to the longtail content. That's content in the 3rd or 4th subdirectorylevel. I would like to do that by saying google: "Just show me traffic that arrives on landingpages with 3 OR 4 slashes "/" But I can't get a solution, can anybody help in the seoMOZ community?
Reporting & Analytics | | viventuraSEO0