Publishing pages with thin content, update later?
-
So I have about 285 pages I created with very, very thin content on each. Each is unique, and each serves its own purpose.
My question is, do you guys think it is wise to publish all of these at once to just get them out there and update each as we go along? Each page is very laser targeted and I anticipate that a large handful will actually rank soon after publishing.
Thanks!
Tom
-
Each location has their own page, and each location page has their own departments listed with their own pages as well. Each department then has some content such as the NAP, an employee directory, and links to other resourceful pages on the website.
If this is making many pages for each location, then I would worry about them. However, if all of this information is on a single page then you might be fine. If I owned a company like this I would require each location to give me substantive content.
Also, if I "noindex" the pages to start, add some good content then "index" them, how long in your experience has it taken until you saw a considerable increase in traffic/see those pages indexed?
I republished two of my thin content pages last week. These were noindexed for about two years. They were upgraded from two or three sentences and one photo to nearly 1000 words and four or five photos. One appeared in the index about five days later and went straight to #4 for a moderately difficult single word query. That single word query is the name of a software product, the name of some type of "gold" in the minecraft video game and has a lot of competition from .gov and .edu. .
The second one was published about eight days ago and we have not seen it in the SERPs yet. This is an unusually long time for us to wait on a republished page for this site which has a DA of about 80.
The way I would approach it would be to crawl those pages manually in Search Console (RIP Webmaster Tools) once I updated the "index" tag.
I have never done this. I just republish the page.
-
Thanks Andy, I appreciate the response. This was a semi-large project with the main goal of capturing hyper-local leads. I guess once you throw locations into the mix it runs an even bigger chance of being hit due to popular practice of creating a page for every damn city in the country in hopes of ranking locally.
Fortunately we have real locations across the US but I don't want Google to think we're trying to dupe anyone.
Thanks again
Tom -
That's the answer I was expecting. The website I'm referencing has about 4,000 indexed pages, and those 285 may be enough to do some damage.
To give you an example (this mimics exactly what I'm doing), take a business with multiple locations. Each location has their own page, and each location page has their own departments listed with their own pages as well. Each department then has some content such as the NAP, an employee directory, and links to other resourceful pages on the website. Yeah or nay to that?
Also, if I "noindex" the pages to start, add some good content then "index" them, how long in your experience has it taken until you saw a considerable increase in traffic/see those pages indexed? I know that's a site-by-site, page-by-page kind of question but I'm curious to know.
The way I would approach it would be to crawl those pages manually in Search Console (RIP Webmaster Tools) once I updated the "index" tag.
Thoughts?
Thanks!
Tom -
Hi
I agree with the above, you run the risk of getting hit by Panda. If these pages are important to have live to help customers, then surely your priority should be to get good content on their to help your customers / potential customers. If they land on a low quality page with very little content, are they likely to stick around.
I wouldn't put any live until you have the content sorted. I would work out the priority and start there and once the content is good then put live.
There is probably a Panda update around the corner and you don't want to get hit with hit and then you are waiting for Google to release the next version to get out of it.
I wouldnt even run the risk of putting them live with noindex.
Unless of course as said above you have 100,000+ pages of amazing quality content then it probably wont affect you.
Thanks
Andy
-
In my opinion, publishing a lot of thin content pages will get you into trouble with the Panda algorithm. One of my sites had a lot of these types of pages and it was hit with a Panda problem. Most pages on the site were demoted in search. I noindexed those thin content pages and the site recovered in a few weeks.
Here is the code that I used... name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />
Although those pages had thin content, they were still valuable reference for my visitors. That is why I noindexed them instead of deleting them.
Those pages have been noindexed for about two years with no problems. Slowly, I am adding a good article to those pages to reduce their number. I worry that some day, Google might change their minds and hit sites that have lots of thin content pages that are noindexed.
I don't know how big your website is. But I am betting that 285 very very thin pages added to a website of a couple thousand pages will be a problem (that's about what I had when my site had a problem). However, if that many very very thin pages are added to a website with 100,000 pages you might get away with it.
Good luck
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
-
Google webcache of product page redirects back to product page
Hi all– I've legitimately never seen this before, in any circumstance. I just went to check the google webcache of a product page on our site (was just grabbing the last indexation date) and was immediately redirected away from google's cached version BACK to the site's standard product page. I ran a status check on the product page itself and it was 200, then ran a status check on the webcache version and sure enough, it registered as redirected. It looks like this is happening for ALL indexed product pages across the site (several thousand), and though organic traffic has not been affected it is starting to worry me a little bit. Has anyone ever encountered this situation before? Why would a google webcache possibly have any reason to redirect? Is there anything to be done on our side? Thanks as always for the help and opinions, y'all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TukTown1 -
Why Would My Page Have a Higher PA and DA, Links & On-Page Grade & Still Not Rank?
The Search Term is "Alcohol Ink" and our client has a better page authority, domain authority, links to the page, and on-page grade than those in the SERP for spaces 5-10 and we're not even ranked in the top 51+ according to Moz's tracker. The only difference I can see is that our URL doesn't use the exact text like some of the 5-10 do. However, regardless of this, our on-page grade is significantly higher than the rest of them. The one thing I found was that there were two links to the page (that we never asked for) that had a spam score in the low 20's and another in the low 30's. Does anyone have any recommendations on how to maybe get around this? Certainly, a content campaign and linking campaign around this could also help but I'm kind of scratching my head. The client is reputable, with a solid domain age and well recognized in the space so it's not like it's a noob trying to get in out of nowhere.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnisye0 -
How many links to the same page can there be for each page?
I need to know if I can add more than 2 equal links on the same page, for example 1 link in the header, another in the body and one in the footer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jorgesep0 -
Minimum amount of content for Ecommerce pages?
Hi Guys, Currently optimizing my e-commerce store which currently has around 100 words of content on average for each category page. Based on this study by Backlinko the more content the better: http://backlinko.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/02_Content-Total-Word-Count_line.png Would you say this is true for e-commerce pages, for example, a page like this: http://www.theiconic.com.au/yoga-pants/ What benefits would you receive with adding more content? Is it basically more content, leads to more potential long-tail opportunity and more organic traffic? Assuming the content is solid and not built just for SEO reasons. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowork2140 -
"No Index, No Follow" or No Index, Follow" for URLs with Thin Content?
Greetings MOZ community: If I have a site with about 200 thin content pages that I want Google to remove from their index, should I set them to "No Index, No Follow" or to "No Index, Follow"? My SEO firm has advised me to set them to "No Index, Follow" but on a recent MOZ help forum post someone suggested "No Index, No Follow". The MOZ poster said that telling Google the content was should not be indexed but the links should be followed was inconstant and could get me into trouble. This make a lot of sense. What is proper form? As background, I think I have recently been hit with a Panda 4.0 penalty for thin content. I have several hundred URLs with less than 50 words and want them de-indexed. My site is a commercial real estate site and the listings apparently have too little content. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
2 pages lost page rank and not showing any backlinks in google
Hi we have a business/service related website, 2 of our main pages lost their page rank from 3 to 0 and are not showing any backlinks in google. What could be the possible reason. Please guide me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tech_Ahead0 -
Artist Bios on Multiple Pages: Duplicate Content or not?
I am currently working on an eComm site for a company that sells art prints. On each print's page, there is a bio about the artist followed by a couple of paragraphs about the print. My concern is that some artists have hundreds of prints on this site, and the bio is reprinted on every page,which makes sense from a usability standpoint, but I am concerned that it will trigger a duplicate content penalty from Google. Some people are trying to convince me that Google won't penalize for this content, since the intent is not to game the SERPs. However, I'm not confident that this isn't being penalized already, or that it won't be in the near future. Because it is just a section of text that is duplicated, but the rest of the text on each page is original, I can't use the rel=canonical tag. I've thought about putting each artist bio into a graphic, but that is a huge undertaking, and not the most elegant solution. Could I put the bio on a separate page with only the artist's info and then place that data on each print page using an <iframe>and then put a noindex,nofollow in the robots.txt file?</p> <p>Is there a better solution? Is this effort even necessary?</p> <p>Thoughts?</p></iframe>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbaylor0 -
Bi-Lingual Site: Lack of Translated Content & Duplicate Content
One of our clients has a blog with an English and Spanish version of every blog post. It's in WordPress and we're using the Q-Translate plugin. The problem is that my company is publishing blog posts in English only. The client is then responsible for having the piece translated, at which point we can add the translation to the blog. So the process is working like this: We add the post in English. We literally copy the exact same English content to the Spanish version, to serve as a placeholder until it's translated by the client. (*Question on this below) We give the Spanish page a placeholder title tag, so at least the title tags will not be duplicate in the mean time. We publish. Two pages go live with the exact same content and different title tags. A week or more later, we get the translated version of the post, and add that as the Spanish version, updating the content, links, and meta data. Our posts typically get indexed very quickly, so I'm worried that this is creating a duplicate content issue. What do you think? What we're noticing is that growth in search traffic is much flatter than it usually is after the first month of a new client blog. I'm looking for any suggestions and advice to make this process more successful for the client. *Would it be better to leave the Spanish page blank? Or add a sentence like: "This post is only available in English" with a link to the English version? Additionally, if you know of a relatively inexpensive but high-quality translation service that can turn these translations around quicker than my client can, I would love to hear about it. Thanks! David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djreich0