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
-
Old site selected as canonical on GSC 3 years after migration?
Recently my company started consulting for a SaaS company. They're clearly the best known, most trusted company on their area of work and they have the strongest brand, best product and therefore more users than any of their competitors by a big margin. Still, 99% of their traffic comes from branded, despite having 3x more domains, better performance scores and more content. Even using tools such as SimilarWeb for comparing user satisfaction metrics, they seem to have lower bounce rates and more visits per session. Still, they rank for almost nothing that is non branded on Google (they rank extremely well for almost everything on bing and DuckDuckGo). They don't have any obvious issues with crawling or indexation - we've gone to great depths to tick off any issues that could be affecting this. My conclusion is that it's either a penalty or a bug, but GSC is not flagging any manual actions. These are the things we've identified: All the content was moved from domain1.com to domain2.com at the end of 2017. 301s were put in place, migration was confirmed on GSC. Everything was done with great care and we couldn't identify any issues with it. Some subdomains of the site, especially support, rank extremely well for all sorts of keywords, even very competitive ones but the www subdomain ranks for almost nothing on Google. The www subdomain has 1,000s of domains pointing to it while the support has only a few 100s. Google is performing delayed rendering attempts on old pages, JS and CSS particularly versions of assets that were live before the migration in 2017, including the old homepage. Again, the redirects have been in place for 3 years. Search Console frequently showing old HTML (at least a year old) in cache despite a recent crawl date and a current 301. Search Console frequently processing old HTML (at least a year old) when reporting on schema. Search Console is sometimes selecting pages from the old domain as the canonical of a URL of an existing page of the current domain, despite a long-standing 301 and the canonicals being well configured for 3 years now. Has anyone experienced anything similar in the past? We've been doing an analysis of old SEO practices, link profile, disavow... nothing points to black hat practices and at this point we're wondering if it's just Google doing a terrible job with this particular domain.
Technical SEO | | oline1230 -
White listing a site
A new clients site is blocked by a lot of Firewalls. And I can't work out why, the content is family friendly they sell nursery equipment. I've run it through the Google checker and there is no malicious software found on the site. Can anyone tell me what I need to do to get this site unblocked? The url is http://knuma.co.uk/
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Optimist0 -
Migrate Old Archive Content?
Hi, Our team has recently acquired several newsletter titles from a competitor. We are currently deciding how to handle the archive content on their website which now belongs to us. We are thinking of leaving the content on their site (so as not to suddenly remove a chunk of their website and harm them) but also replicating it on ours with a canoncial link to say our website is the original source. The articles on their site go back as far as 2010. Do you think it would help or hinder our site to have a lot of old archive content added to it? I'm thinking of content freshness issues.Even though the content is old some of it will still be interesting or relevant. Or do you think the authority and extra traffic this content could bring in makes it worth migrating. Any help gratefully received on the old content issue or the idea of using canonical links in this way. Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | frantan0 -
301 Multiple Sites to Main Site
Over the past couple years I had 3 sites that sold basically the same products and content. I later realized this had no value to my customers or Google so I 301 redirected Site 2 and Site 3 to my main site (Site 1). Of course this pushed a lot of page rank over to Site 1 and the site has been ranking great. About a week ago I moved my main site to a new eCommerce platform which required me to 301 redirect all the url's to the new platform url's which I did for all the main site links (Site 1). During this time I decided it was probably better off if I DID NOT 301 redirect all the links from the other 2 sites as well. I just didn't see the need as I figured Google realized at this point those sites were gone and I started fearing Google would get me for Page Rank munipulation for 301 redirecting 2 whole sites to my main site. Now I am getting over 1,000 404 crawl errors in GWT as Google can no longer find the URL's for Site 2 and Site 3. Plus my rankings have dropped substantially over the past week, part of which I know is from switching platforms. Question, did I make a mistake not 301 redirecting the url's from the old sites (Site 2 and Site 3) to my new ecommerce url's at Site 1?
Technical SEO | | SLINC0 -
Duplicate Content
SEOmoz is reporting duplicate content for 2000 of my pages. For example, these are reported as duplicate content: http://curatorseye.com/Name=“Holster-Atlas”---Used-by-British-Officers-in-the-Revolution&Item=4158
Technical SEO | | jplill
http://curatorseye.com/Name=âHolster-Atlasâ---Used-by-British-Officers-in-the-Revolution&Item=4158 The actual link on the site is http://www.curatorseye.com/Name=“Holster-Atlas”---Used-by-British-Officers-in-the-Revolution&Item=4158 Any insight on how to fix this? I'm not sure where the second version of the URL is coming from. Thanks,
Janet0 -
Duplicate Content - Products
When running a report it says we have lots of duplicate content. We are a e-commerce site that has about 45,000 sku's on the site. Products can be in multiple departments on the site. So the same products can show up on different pages of the site. Because of this the reports show multiple products with duplicate content. Is this an issue with google and site ranking? Is there a way to get around this issue?
Technical SEO | | shoedog1 -
Duplicate Content
The crawl shows a lot of duplicate content on my site. Most of the urls its showing are categories and tags (wordpress). so what does this mean exactly? categories is too much like other categories? And how do i go about fixing this the best way. thanks
Technical SEO | | vansy0 -
How to move a site slowly
I've got a site that I started back in 2001 (www.jaaroncaststone.com) to sell what I was making, concrete countertops and sinks. Well we're going to be discontinuing the concrete products in a month or so and want to start pointing all the links from the old site to a new one dedicated to a single product (www.jaaron-wood-countertops.com). I don't want to do a full 301 on the old site just yet but can I put a canonical tag on the index and about us pages pointing to the new site now so the search engines start looking that way or should I wait and do a full 301 when the day comes to pull the old site?
Technical SEO | | JAARON0