UGC News articles
-
Hi! Quick question regarding UGC...
On our site - http://designrfix.com - we have a /news section (which contains about 40 000 news items) - shown in the right sidebar at the bottom
I recently changed the /news (and all subpages) section to noindex and asked a removal on Google Webmaster Tools... was this a good idea? Those pages are low content pages and the bounce rate is really high since all articles are external sites.
-
Thanks for sharing that.
I have thought about opening our news to visitor submissions. Right now we do it all ourselves (about eight to ten items per day).
I worry that visitors will submit a lot of spam and self-promotion that will decrease our quality. If weeding takes a few hours per day then we are better off doing it inhouse.
Thanks again for sharing.
-
Great thanks again,
We get between 40 and 50+ per day and yes i take the time to weed out all the spam, which is almost always 1/3rd of submissions. quite time consuming. (a few hours a day)
-
I've put back the /news items as "noindex, follow" and as well as some internal links.
Yes. I think that is an improvement.
ps. All of our external links are nofollow.
I didn't realize that. Good idea on a blog where users can submit items.
pps. I had to put some disallow rules in our robots.txt to remove the news category and pages. I'm guessing i still have to keep those rules in place correct?
I allow the category pages on my blog to be indexed. They bring in thousands of visitors per day.
Last question... would you also keep pagination as "noindex, follow" or open it all up?
On my sites the pagination is noindex follow.
A couple questions for you...
Do you receive a lot of user submitted news items?
Do you think that you get a lot of spam submissions? How much time do you have to spend weeding the spam?
-
Thanks EGOL!
I've put back the /news items as "noindex, follow" and as well as some internal links.
ps. All of our external links are nofollow.
pps. I had to put some disallow rules in our robots.txt to remove the news category and pages. I'm guessing i still have to keep those rules in place correct?Last question... would you also keep pagination as "noindex, follow" or open it all up?
-
I have a similar section on one of my sites and I believe that it was part of a Panda problem in one of the early Panda updates. I used noindex / follow on those pages and the site recovered in a few weeks.
On that site I have about 150 category pages and they pull in a ton of traffic.
Your posts seem to include some UGC and they appear to be receiving followed links. Perhaps linking to bad neighborhoods is an important concern.... and a lot of your internal links are nofollowed. If this was my site all of the internal links would be followed and the external UGC links would be nofollowed.
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
-
Outsourcing Blog Articles
I have two businesses, one is my main bread and butter and the other is an invest and try to grow type of business. This second business is a nature / education related business, so I would like to have a repository of informative nature articles with some splashes of our experience with that particular plant or animal. I spend a lot of time on SEO and article writing on my main business, but I am running out of myself to go around. I would like to outsource article / blog writing on my second businesses, but I'm not sure where to start. If I use one of those work for hire sites in the Moz outsourced content article, can I get them to format the blog with photos as well. I need to have a complete as possible final product. Ideally, I'm thinking of this process: 1. Give the outsourced writer the subject matter (i.e. article about right whales) 2. I provide my own photography or photos I have purchased 3. Writer researches subject matter and writes an informative article 4. Writer logs into my blog and formats the article with interesting fonts and the photos I have provide 5. I edit the article to add my own experience with the subject matter 6. I publish the article I'm thinking I would do this twice a month. Is this a reasonable thing to outsource? Could it work this way? Any idea what an article like this might cost me? I'm doing some marketing budget planning. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | CalicoKitty20001 -
To update or not to update news URLs ?
We manage a huge daily news website in my small country - keeping this a bit mysterious in case competitors are reading 🙂 Our URL structure is www.companyname.com/news/categoryofnews/title-of-article?id=articleid In this hyperreactive news world, title of articles change frequently (may be ten times a day for the main stories). The question we debate is : should we reflect the modification of the title in the URL or not ? Example : "Trump says he wants to ban search engines" would have URL http://www.companyname.com/news/entertainment/Trump-says-he-wants-to-ban-search-engines?id=12345678 Later in the day the title becomes "Trump denies he suggested banning search engines". Should the URL be modified to http://www.companyname.com/news/entertainment/Trump-denies-he-suggested-banning-search-engines?id=12345678 (option A) or not (option B) ? In Google News it makes no difference because of the sitemap, but in Google organic things are different. At present (option B in place), Google apparently doesn't see that the article has been updated, and shows the initial timestamp which is visually (and presumably SEOwise) not good : our new news looks like old news. Modifiying the URL would solve that issue, but could, may be, create another one : the new URL, being considered a new article, would lose, the acquired weight of the previous one in terms of referrals, social trafic and so on. Or not ? What do you think is the best option ? Thanks for your expertise, Yves
On-Page Optimization | | yves678901 -
Update old article or publish new content and redirect old post?
Hi all, I'm targetting a keyword and we used to rank quite good for it. Last couple of months traffic of that keyword (and variations) is going down a bit. I wrote an extensive new post on the same topic, much more in dept and from 600 to 1800 words covering the same topic. Is it better to update the old article and mention that it's updated recently, or publish a new post and redirect the old post to the new post?
On-Page Optimization | | jorisbrabants0 -
Why Isnt My New Article Indexed?
I posted this article last night: http://www.londontri.com/325/tomtom-runner-gps-watch-review It didn't appear in Google's index this morning despite me pointing a few high quality links to it (not keyword optimized links, just links from high quality forum posts) On closer examination I thought that the problem could be due to a keyword stuffing penalty so I have made sure that I am not repeating too many words/word combinations using a keyword density checker but the article is still not indexed. Any ideas what could be going on?
On-Page Optimization | | ross88guy0 -
Should I index news and blog posts which receive little traffic
Hi all, I have a very large site at the moment with a handful of high authority pages with great content which describe the charity's work. But the main content on the site is blogs and news article which, while being good quality content from a reader's point of view, receive little traffic from search engines as they are so niche and long-tail. They do, however, get ok internal traffic from other pages. Should these pages be indexed still or should I remove them? Is there a rule of thumb regarding minimum clicks/bounce rates that an indexed page should have? What do big news agencies do with really niche articles that may get next to no traffic but have valuable content on for those that do click through? Thanks in advance! Den
On-Page Optimization | | Deniz0 -
Meta keywords and meta news keywords
I've got a question regarding this. So normally Meta keywords it is not relevant and we shouldn't use them, however there are opinions that we can use them as these are signals for other Search Engines. Meta news keywords - are ok to be used in the news sites. what is your opinion on using both of them on a news site? Can this help, or harm? thanks, Irina
On-Page Optimization | | InformMedia0 -
Do a lot of related articles in lower subfolders, boost higher level subfolder keywords?
For instance www.example1.com/cooltopic/ has 5 ‘verycool articles’ under /cooltopic/ www.example1.com/cooltopic/verycool-article1/ , www.example1.com/cooltopic/verycool-article2/. On www.example2.com/cooltopic/ there are 100 ‘verycool articles’ Who will rank above the other for the term ‘cooltopic’ in the SERPS? Is it www.example1.com with 5 ‘verycool articles’ or www.example2.com with 100 ‘verycool articles’. Or does the quantity of (theme related) articles in subfolders not matter? And what if example1.com has more quality external links from the ‘awesome community’. Would this change a lot in the rankings? Or what if both domains have 0 external links, but example2.com has 95 more internal links (from the articles) to /cooltopic/ than example1.com with only 5 articles.
On-Page Optimization | | PrizeWize0 -
What Drupal 7 module for SEO, or if not what other SEO software for article writing does anyone recommend?
what Drupal 7 module for SEO article writing optimization, analyzation does anyone recommend? Thanks in advance. We are updating our sites and need this information. If hter is not a Drupal module what else would you recommend?
On-Page Optimization | | alternativelaw0