SEO for a Deal Blog

[dealblogger]

Hi,

I have a deal blog that is several months old. My established and successful "competitors" have a high Domain Authority (43, 46, 63) but most of their blog posts are very short. Our readers want to know about the coupon, deal, discount, code etc - they don't want 250 + words for each post.

However I am concerned that lots of short posts will label my blog as low quality and that Google Panda will get me.

My competitors easily get on page 1 of google. Yes they also write articles but majority of their posts are short.

I deindexed quite a few short blog posts but my audience googles for coupons and deals like crazy. I try to give as much info as I can without being wordy and annoying but sometimes that still gets me only 100 words. I also write a lot of articles relevant to my niche (mom/baby/maternity) that are high quality and several hundred words.

Just looking for input on deal blog SEO.

Thanks!

[dealblogger]

I have wondered what to do about expired deals. Thanks for all your help.

[SEOAndy]

You may find useful this tool I use "fruition" it looks at whether you are likely to be hit or have been hit by an update - http://fruition.net/

Its useful because you don't want to be hit by future updates nor previous ones being refreshed.

In terms of de-indexing, unless you've thousands, it's probably a waste of time and effort. If they don't rank thats fine and unless you intend to delete them at some point it's not worth it really. you could look at maybe a system where say 3 months after the deal ends it redirects to a page for that shop which has the latest offers on - this way you deal with another issue of drop off because people see something has expired... if that makes sense?

[dealblogger]

Thank you!

Ok that is something I have tried to do. If I mention a certain deal on Amazon - underneath I try and give good info on Amazon Mom membership, or review the product if I have it. So I try to extend it for the newbies to give them info (and make google happy) even though I know a lot won't read it.

Should I deindex some of my coupon/sale posts - the ones I am sure won't be picked up by google anyway due to VERY HIGH competition? Or ones that I don't have time to bulk out?

Is there a tool out there that can analyze my site as a whole and say if it is low quality?

[SEOAndy]

it's a tough one. There isn't a one-size solution (as with any SEO).

My advice would be to bulk out your site as awhole, for example lots of deal / voucher sites have whole pages for particular brands and talk about the brand to bulk out that content rather than just say here is a voucher.

If you site is literally just a blog you could take the same idea and put maybe 100 words describing the company the deal is for, twist it each time and sometimes not use it at all - but it will bulk out your content without getting in the way.

The other thing could be to list the "necessary" stuff like name, code, expiry and link etc and then just use the space below that won't be read by users but will be by search engines to talk about something related to that deal - bulk out the content even though users won't read it and show google what quality is.

Hope that helps