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
-
How do I split page content?
So I offer two services for which each has an FAQ page (let's call them S1 and S2). The problem is that I also have a longer FAQ page that covers both services (S1-2). I would like to eliminate the longer one and attach the relevant content to each of the shorter pages but i'm concerned that deleting pages with a lot of content might be a bad idea. I could redirect I suppose but I wouldn't know which page S1 or S2 to point redirect to. Any advice on this?
Content Development | | NationalPardon0 -
Curated content on page one of google for medium competition keywords?
Has anyone here ranked curated content on page one of Google for medium competition keywords?
Content Development | | jtbaker19710 -
Content Syndication Strategies
Hi I'm currently doing some research into content syndication strategies for our new and existing client base. Does anyone on here have any case studies, better still, success stories that may help broaden my exposure within this topic? Many thanks Gary
Content Development | | GaryVictory0 -
Can you link build without adding any content to the website?
I am an agency-side SEO who has a few different SEO clients. A couple of them absolutely refuse to add any content to their site - no blog, no articles, no link bait, nothing. They have resisted efforts for any content to be placed on their site - whether it is written by us, them, or a third party. They just don't see the value in it, despite my attempts to persuade them. As a result, these websites are just brochure websites. What are your options for link building in this situation? If content is the foundation of white hat link building, what do you do if the client refuses to add content to their site? All help gratefully received! Thanks
Content Development | | kevinmorley0 -
Is there a software that gives keyword density for primary and seconday keywords as content is written ?
What software do you recommend to write web content for a new website and then manage the same as the site gets older. I am looking for a software that can take a list of primary and secondary keywords - give the keyword density and have the ability to create internal links between pages.
Content Development | | aromal70 -
Duplicate content because of tag
Dear Expert, I use several tags in my single post (www.rumahapp.com), for example when i post something about new game release i would use these tags: Publisher name, game rating and game genre. The problem is seomoz crawl my page and said that i have duplicate content between http://www.rumahapp.com/tag/com2us/ and http://www.rumahapp.com/tag/homerun-battle-2 how do i solve this? is this mean that i shouldn't use tag in my post? thank you
Content Development | | Gundud0 -
Keeping web site fresh re content
We currently use a wp blog but we don not host on the web domain. What are the advanatges to moving the blog to the domain The only 1 I can think of is every time we update the blog this should help keep the web site fresh with new content .
Content Development | | NotThatFast0 -
Duplicate content?
I am not understanding this - I see a duplicate content warning. When I look into it I see these two urls: http;//search-engine-upgrade.com http;//search-engine-upgrade.com/default.asp (NOT a blog)
Content Development | | dcmike0