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
-
Paragraphs/Tables for Content & SEO
Hi Does anyone know if Google prefers paragraphs over content in a table, or doesn't it make much difference?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Complicated Duplicate Content Question...but it's fun, so please help.
Quick background: I have a page that is absolutely terrible, but it has links and it's a category page so it ranks. I have a landing page which is significantly - a bizillion times - better, but it is omitted in the search results for the most important query we need. I'm considering switching the content of the two pages, but I have no idea what they will do. I'm not sure if it will cause duplicate content issues or what will happen. Here are the two urls: Terrible page that ranks (not well but it's what comes up eventually) https://kemprugegreen.com/personal-injury/ Far better page that keeps getting omitted: https://kemprugegreen.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-attorney/ Any suggestions (other than just wait on google to stop omitting the page, because that's just not going to happen) would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Lower quality new domain link vs higher quality repeat domain link
First time poster here with a dilemma that head scratching and spreadsheets can't solve! I'm trying to work out whether to focus on getting links from new domains or to nurture relationships with the bigger sites in our business and get more links. Of the two links below which does the community here think would be more valuable a signal to Google? Both would be links from within relevant text/post copy. Link 1. Site DA 30. No links currently from this domain. Link 2. Site DA 60. Many links over last 12 months already from this domain. I suspect link 1 but given the enormous disparity in ranking power am I correct?! Thanks for any considered opinions out there! Matthew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mat20150 -
Looking for help with my website
Hi does any one know of a good seo company that will get results, i.e., fix site issues and get the site improving in the serps.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Redirect help
I work for a company that has a domain that is something like www.neat-stuff.com but most people just use www.neatstuff.com without the dash. The redirect for the homepage works fine. We recently launched a new site and if you use www.neat-stuff.com/category it redirects from the old site to the new site just fine. However if you use www.neatstuff.com/category it does not properly redirect to www.neat-stuff.com/category. How do I fix that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Emergency Help...
Hello All, I'm trying to get a better handle on this, but any help would be hugely appreciated. Per my Pro account, i just found out that the keyword i was severely trying to rank for "Boston Wedding Phot*grapher" i just declined by over 40 positions. Just last week i was in the #3 position. Needless to say, this is extremely bad. I feel sick from it. This is my livelyhood. I recently hired a 'so-called' SEO expert to look at it, but i'm having my doubts. I'm using a php based site with a wordpress blog. He added a bunch of 301 redirects from pages that the crawler was complaining about to my .htaccess file. He also installed the following plugins: Link Juice Keeper NoFollow Free The SEO Rich Snippets Udinra All Image Sitemap WP Robots Txt WP-PageNavi Add Meta Tags These are essentially the only changes made. Does anyone see anything blaring and/or obvious? I could really really use some help. My blog link is : http://www.symbolphoto.com/blog/ I'm assuming it's the blog because that's where most of my site content is located. Any advice is hugely appreciated. TIA.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | symbolphoto0 -
Help With Preferred Domain Settings, 301 and Duplicate Content
I've seen some good threads developed on this topic in the Q&A archives, but feel this topic deserves a fresh perspective as many of the discussion were almost 4 years old. My webmaster tools preferred domain setting is currently non www. I didn't set the preferred domain this way, it was like this when I first started using WM tools. However, I have built the majority of my links with the www, which I've always viewed as part of the web address. When I put my site into an SEO Moz campaign it recognized the www version as a subdomain which I thought was strange, but now I realize it's due to the www vs. non www preferred domain distinction. A look at site:mysite.com shows that Google is indexing both the www and non www version of the site. My site appears healthy in terms of traffic, but my sense is that a few technical SEO items are holding me back from a breakthrough. QUESTION to the SEOmoz community: What the hell should I do? Change the preferred domain settings? 301 redirect from non www domain to the www domain? Google suggests this: "Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer." Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC1