Adding more content to an old site
-
We have a site which was de-moted from PR4 to PR3 with the latest Google update. We have not done any SEO for a long time for the site and the content is the same with over 100 page.
My question is, in order to update the site, which is the best to do it, do we:
1. re-introduced new content to replace old once
2. re-write old content
3. Add new pages
Many thanks in advance.
-
Is your site verified in Google Webmaster Tools, and Bing's Webmaster Tools? If not, get it verified, then look at your account. There's a wealth of information there, including any notices from the search engines about anything they find that might be suspect (Google now even sends a note for buying/selling links), and you can get some better statistics about your site when it's verified.
I would first look in your webmaster tools, and see if the engines have flagged anything for you. If so, then you know what to work on first.
Second, step back and think about what purpose your website has for your business, is it meeting that purpose, and what are useful metrics for you.
In May, Matt Cutts did a video response to a person asking why toolbar PR isn't updated more frequently (available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ9pFUSVG9g) and mentioned that while they internally keep a close eye on correct PR, they're not as worried about what shows up in the toolbar. They have some flags if something with super-high PR goes down to super-low PR in the toolbar, but a move from 4 to 3 doesn't fall under that.
So, it's probably good to be thinking about your site, but think beyond the toolbar PR.
-
I never really bothered to check any other metric up untill I came to this forum. Our keyword ranking has dropped slightly in the past few months but we don't really depend much on site traffic to generate income as the business already has regular feed of businesses using our services.
-
Google's homepage recently went from a toolbar pagerank 10 to a toolbar pagerank 9. What are your other metrics like? Has your organic traffic from Google changed in the six months? Toolbar PR is just one indication of how Google views your site, and is on that is infrequently updated and not totally accurately reported to the user, and is several weeks old by the time it is published.
-
Hi Seomagnet, If you have been demoted there may be black hat criteria on your website, have a good look at your on-site optimization and backlink strength before adding fresh content. If you are determined this is due to old content by all means write some more pages but I would personally start with on-site then off-site then building the website bigger.
-
You could have been right on the cusp with your original PR4 and lost just enough links to turn the reading back to PR3. One thing to check would be 404 errors, fixing and redirecting any that you possibly can, and seeing where you're getting links (or links from the past) and creating new pages that would be well received in that segment.
-
Thanks for that, we are about to introduce a blog into the site, but was a bit unsure of our existing content which for some is by now is out of date...
-
Of these 3 options you laid out I would recommend adding new pages. You can always find other content about your company/services/products that is not posted on your website and recycle it to a degree. Have you guys ever thought about implementing a blog into the website. As far as a great user friendly way to continue to product content a blog is great.
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
-
Site Navigation
Hello, I have some questions about best practices with site navigation & internal linking. I'm currently assisting aplossoftware.com with its navigation. The site has about 200 pages total. They currently have a very sparse header with a lot of links in the footer. The three most important keywords they want to rank for are nonprofit accounting software, church accounting software and file 990 online. 1. What are your thoughts about including a drop down menu in the header for the different products? (they have 3 main products). This would allow us to include a few more links in the header and give more real estate to include full keywords in anchor text. 2. They have a good blog with content that gets regularly updated. Currently it's linked in the footer and gets a tiny amount of visits. What are your thoughts about including it as a link in the header instead? 3. What are best practices with using (or not using) no follow with site navigation and footer links? How about with links to social media pages like Facebook/Twitter? Any other thoughts/ideas about the site navigation for this site (www.aplossoftware.com) would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | stageagent0 -
Poor Site Performance
Hello, A couple of months ago, this site was dropped from google due to a noindex, nofollow tag thewealthymind(dot)com It's back up, but performing poorly. Take for example the term "The 4 step belief change" in the home page title tag. This site is the #1 authority on that and yet it ranks 3rd below weaker pages. There's 180 404 errors in GWT, many from past versions of pages of the site but also including thewealthymind(dot)com/index.html and thewealthymind(dot)com/index.htm even though there is a rel=cononical tag on the home page. What's the process of getting this site back to health?
Technical SEO | | BobGW0 -
Content on top-level-domain vs. content on subpage
Hello Seomoz community, I just built a new website, mainly for a single affiliate programm and it ranks really well at google. Unfortunately the merchant doesn’t like the name of my domain, that’s why I was thrown out of the affiliate program. So suppose the merchant is a computer monitor manufacturer and his name is “Digit”. The name of my domain is something like monitorsdigital.com at the moment. (It’s just an example, I don’t own this URL). The structure of my website is: 1 homepage with much content on it + a blog. The last 5 blog entries are displayed on the homepage. Because I got kicked out of the affiliate program I want to permanent redirect monitorsdigital.com to another domain. But what should the new website look like? I have two possibilities: Copy the whole monitorsdigital website to a new domain, called something like supermonitors.com. Integrate the monitorsdigital website into my existing website about different monitor manufacturers. E.g.: allmonitors.com/digit-monitors.html (that url is permitted by the merchant) What do you think is the better way? I just got the impression, that it seems to be a little easier to rank high with a top-level-domain (www.supermonitors.com) than with a subpage (www.allmonitors.com/digit-monitors.html). However the subpage can benefit from the domain authority, that was generated by other subpages. Thanks for your help and best regards MGMT
Technical SEO | | MGMT0 -
How to add a disclaimer to a site but keep the content accessible to search robots?
Hi, I have a client with a site regulated by the UK FSA (Financial Services Authority). They have to display a disclaimer which visitor must accept before browsing. This is for real, not like the EU cookie compliance debacle 🙂 Currently the site 302 redirects anyone not already cookied (as having accepted) to a disclaimer page/form. Do you have any suggestions or examples of how to require acceptance while maintaining accessibility? I'm not sure just using a jquery lightbox would meet the FSA's requirements, as it wouldn't be shown if JS was not enabled. Thanks, -Jason
Technical SEO | | GroupM_APAC0 -
How is this site doing this?
http://www.meccabingo.com It shows a splash / promotion page yet you check the cache and it's the real homepage, they are doing this so they don't lose rankings but how are they redirecting users to that but Google is caching the real homepage? is it friendly? thanks!!
Technical SEO | | AdiRste0 -
How to do a no follow on site search
We have a site search that is causing a huge amount of errors as the SEOmoz crawler is showing these as duplicate content. Our first thought was to do a no-follow on the site-search directory, but we realized that the site search is /site-search.aspx and URl strings appear at the end for hundreds of pages. How dow we/how can we no-follow an undetermined amount of URL strings?
Technical SEO | | Apptixweb0 -
Partial Site Move -- Tell Google Entire Site Moved?
OK this one's a little confusing, please try to follow along. We recently went through a rebranding where we brought a new domain online for one of our brands (we'll call this domain 'B' -- it's also not the site linked to in my profile, not to confuse things). This brand accounted for 90% of the pages and 90% of the e-comm on the existing domain (we'll call the existing domain 'A') . 'A' was also redesigned and it's URL structure has changed. We have 301s in place on A that redirect to B for those 90% of pages and we also have internal 301s on A for the remaining 10% of pages whose URL has changed as a result of the A redesign What I'm wondering is if I should tell Google through webmaster tools that 'A' is now 'B' through the 'Change of Address' form. If I do this, will the existing products that remain on A suffer? I suppose I could just 301 the 10% of URLs on B back to A but I'm wondering if Google would see that as a loop since I just got done telling it that A is now B. I realize there probably isn't a perfect answer here but I'm looking for the "least worst" solution. I also realize that it's not optimal that we moved 90% of the pages from A to B, but it's the situation we're in.
Technical SEO | | badgerdigital0 -
Are lots of links from an external site to non-existant pages on my site harmful?
Google Webmaster Tools is reporting a heck of a lot of 404s which are due to an external site linking incorrectly to my site. The site itself has scraped content from elsewhere and has created 100's of malformed URLs. Since it unlikely I will have any joy having these linked removed by the creator of the site, I'd like to know how much damage this could be doing, and if so, is there is anything I can do to minimise the impact? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15569050351140