With Panda, which is more important, traffic or quantity?
-
If you were to prioritize how to fix a site, would you focus on traffic or quantity of urls? So for example, if 10% of a site had thin content, but accounted for 50% of the traffic and 50% of the site had a different type of thin content but only accounted for 5% of organic traffic, which would you work on first? I realize both need to be fixed, but am unsure of which to tackle first (this is an extremely large site).
Also, I am wondering if the simply the presence of thin content on a domain can affect a site even if it isn't receiving any traffic.
-
I would focus on the thin content that accounts for 50% of your traffic. From what I've seen Panda update may consider what visitors do when they get to your site, ie; high bounce rates, low page views, etc can negatively effect rankings. Focus on the pages that already get traffic and improve their experience and Google will reward you.
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
-
Domain Authority important if we pursue longtail non-competitive keywords?
Hi, We currently have a relatively low DA score of 26. We have been working to increase it but of course it takes time. We are starting to adapt our approach and rank for non-competitive, long-tail keywords. If our DA is very low, will this affect our longtail keyword ranking even though there is very little competition for those? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cmavroudisyahoocom0 -
Importance - meta title keyword
HI I want to find out how important people think it is to have the keyword as the first word in the meta title? Is this something that would even make a difference?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Website still not recovered from Panda # 20 (Sep 2012 update)
Hi everyone,My website was hit by Panda around the 27th September 2012 (Panda # 20 or EMD) , since then, it's no longer in Google search results for a particular keyword [wallpapers], resulting in a massive sudden traffic drop (-90%) (see the screenshot below).Despite my best efforts auditing my links, identifying unnatural backlinks, disavowing bad links, enhancing my website content, improving user experience... (I even ended up with a completely revamped website: new design, new structure and new content), I didn't see any improvement! Can you please look at It and Advise me? I am ready to give up; I am in deep despair.What are my competitors doing better than me? Competitor #1 Competitor #2Thank you in advance - I appreciate your timeMy website: http://goo.gl/maaxazLroAvD5.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Spinodza0 -
Lost 86% of traffic after moving old static site to WordPress
I hired a company to convert an old static website www.rawfoodexplained.com with about 1200 pages of content to WordPress. Four days after launch it lost almost 90% of traffic. It was getting over 60,000 uniques while nobody touched the site for several years. It’s been 21 days since the WordPress launch. I read a lot of stuff prior to moving it (including Moz's case study) and I was expecting to lose in short term 30% of traffic max… I don’t understand what is wrong. The internal link structure is the same, every url is 301 to the same url only without[dot]html (ie www.rawfoodexplained.com/science.html is 301′s to http://www.rawfoodexplained.com/science/ ), it’s added to Google Webmaster tool and Google indexed the new pages… Any ideas what could be possible wrong? I do understand the website is not optimized (meta descriptions etc, but it wasn't before either) .... Do you think putting back the old site would recover the traffic? I would appreciate any thoughts Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JakubH0 -
Are widgets dangerous after the Panda update?
My site provides widgets (online polls) which were developed so that each one would embed a do follow text link into the customers website. With Panda's unnatural link algorithm now in place should I modify these links to be nofollow and give up on this strategy or alternatively just set the text as my sites domain name? The only other option I could think of was to only embed links where the customers site had a certain page rank or above? Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blendfish1 -
3 Sites Covering Similar Topics & Panda
My question will take a bit of explaining, so here goes: I have 3 blogs on the same server: 1. personal finance blog; 2. credit card blog; 3. prepaid credit card blog. The personal finance blog is my flagship site started in 2007, which feeds my family and pays the mortgage. By contrast, the other two sites (started in 2008 and 2010) I would gladly kill if the result would help my personal finance blog. In the fall of 2010 (before Panda) the prepaid card blog was penalized by Google. This has been confirmed by Google in response to a reconsideration request. Of course, they don't say why. I've tried a number of things and resubmitted the site, but with no luck. Both the personal finance blog and credit card blog were hit by Panda 2 (April 11, 2011) and have not recovered. While the personal finance site covers many topics (e.g., investing, credit, debt, money management), its income comes largely from credit cards. We review individual credit cards and have pages that list cards by category (e.g., balance transfer, cash back, travel). The credit card blog does the same thing, but of course covers credit cards in more depth. There is a similar overlap between the prepaid card blog on the one hand, and the credit card blog and personal finance blog on the other. However, all content is unique. I do not currently link between the sites, although until a few months ago I had blogroll links between the sites and a few (less than 10) content links. If you've made it this far (and I hope you have), here are my questions: 1. Could the existence of the credit card and prepaid credit card sites be hurting my personal finance blog's rankings in Google, whether via Panda or otherwise? 2. If there is a reasonable chance that the answer to question 1 is yes, what would you suggest I do? Of course, I could just take down the sites, but I wonder if there are other options. One thought I had was to deindex the two card sites (I assume I can do this by disallowing googlebot via robots.txt) and give it time. Would Google treat this as if the sites did not exist? Both sites get a fair amount of traffic from bing and yahoo, so this option appeals to me. Of course, for all I know the existence of the two card sites are hurting my personal finance blog's rankings in bing and yahoo, too. I thought about selling the sites, but if they are hurting my personal finance site, I grow concerned about how google distinguishes between a site being sold and a webmaster just trying to make the sites look like they are owned by different people. In this regard, I've never tried to hide the common ownership of the sites and have no intention of doing that now. If I kill the sites, should I redirect them to my personal finance site? For the penalized prepaid card site, this seems both risky and unhelpful. But perhaps redirecting the credit card site is an option. Given that the personal finance site is my livelihood, I greatly appreciate your thoughts on my dilemma.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bergerlaw0 -
Need help identifying why my content rich site was hurt by the Panda Update.
Hi - I run a hobby related niche new / article / resource site (http://tinyurl.com/4eavaj4) which has been heavily impacted by the Panda update. Honestly I have no idea why my Google rankings dropped off. I've hired 2 different SEO experts to look into it and no one has been able to figure it out. My link profile is totally white hat and stronger then the majority of my competitors, I have 4000+ or so pages of unique, high quality content, am a Google News source, and publish about 5 new unique articles every day. I ended up deleting a 100 or so thin video pages on my site, did some url reorganization (using 301s), and fixed all the broken links. That appeared to be helping as my traffic was returning to normal. Then the bottom dropped out again. Since Saturday my daily traffic has dropped by 50%. I am really baffled at this point as to what to do so any help would be sincerely appreciated. Thanks, Mike jamescrayton2003@yahoo.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeATL0