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
-
Shall I hide short product review texts from customers (to avoid google panda/quality issues)?
About 30% of product reviews that the clients of our ecommerce store submitted in the last 10 years are 3 words or less (we did not require any minimum length). Would you recommend to hide those very short review texts? Where to draw the limit?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Numeric star rating would still go into our accumulated product rating. My only concern here is what impact it may have on google ranking.
To give some context, the site has for a long time some panda/phantom related issues where there are no obvious reasons that we could point to.0 -
Huge httaccess with old 301 redirects. Is it safe to delete all redirects with no traffic in last 2 months?
We have a huge httaccess file over several MB which seems to be the cause for slow server response time. There are lots of 301 redirects related to site migration from 9 months ago where all old URLs were redirected to new URL and also lots of 301 redirects from URL changes accumulated over the last 15 years. Is it safe to delete all 301 redirects which did not receive any traffic in last 2 months ? Or would you apply another criteria for identifying those 301 that can be safely deleted? Any way to get in google analytics or webmaster tools all 301 that received traffic in the last 2 months or any other easy way to identify those, apart from checking the apache log files ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Loss of traffic due to domain move, not recovering
I have a new client who this year chose to eliminate using a "stronger", older domain (domain authority 50) for a newer, weaker domain (domain authority 38). The redirects actually started end of 2013 and happened over time by page/section. All were completed by Jan 12 2014. While 301 redirects are in place, and the robots.txt is disallowing all (187 pages blocked), it looks as though Google is still indexing pages (149 indexed) although not sure why. Perhaps they should be removed from the server? In spite of the redirects, they are not getting the (combined) traffic expected. Should they have had that expectation? Could it be because they are going from a "stronger", long established domain to a "weaker", newer domain, that it may take a long time to recover? They recently had another agency review the links on the weaker domain and they submitted a file to Google to disavow the links they found to be "toxic" however it doesn't seem to have made any difference, yet. Any idea how long it "should" take to make a difference, if it will indeed make a difference? They do have a blog in a sub-directory that doesn't get much traffic (approx 0.50% of the total traffic). Every post ends with a blatant self-promotion and due to Penguin, they have recently begun to mix up their link text and not include a link on every post. Last their target audience is both B-B and B-C, with B-B being priority. The big question I have is do you see changes take place with almost instant results in Google? Or am I right in telling him, this will take some time. He feels it's been almost 4 months now and their visibility/traffic should be more in par with what it was combined. Something to note is that they were sort of competing with themselves by using both domains however the number of searchers probably hasn't changed much... Thank you so much for giving me your 2 cents!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cindyt-17038
xo0 -
Drop in traffic after redesign
Is it common for a site to see slight traffic drops after a site redesign (containing cleaner code, more usability and basically just being more helpful for the end user)? A new site of ours went live last Wednesday and has experienced a drop in traffic. If you have seen this in your own site, how did you recover? And how long did the recovery take?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Does this make sense to recover from panda?
Hello guys, our website was pandalized on 9/27/2012 and we haven't been able to recover since then. I've fixed as much as possible when it comes to poor content, and we have been getting high quality links consistently for the past 3-4 months. Our blog had some duplicate content issues due to categories, tags, feeds, etc. I solved those problems before the past 2 refreshes without success. I'm considering moving the blog to a subdomain, more than PR, I'm interested in recovering from panda, and let the blog grow on its own. What do you think about that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DaveMri0 -
Whether our shared articles caused Panda hit to our high quality site
Hello, We are a quality site hit by Panda Our article collection: http://www.nlpca(dot)com/DCweb/NLP_Articles.html is partially articles written by the site owners and partially articles that are elsewhere on them web. We have permission to post every article, but I don't know if Google knows that. Could this be why we were hit by Panda? And if so, what do we do? We've dropped way down in rank but have worked our way half-way back up. Two of our main keywords are: NLP NLP Training Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
How important is sticking to an exact keyword?
The latest article I'm writing for my site is "Friends With Benefits Rules"... So the first part of my question is, what does SEOMoz advocate as being the ideal # of times to include the entire key phrase in the article? I know nobody but Google knows for certain, but is 4 (including in H1's etc.) generally considered enough, other than in the page title? Second part is, what is the consensus about how important is it to stick to the exact keyword? For the example I gave, is it just as good to include a comma, E.g. "...friends with benefits, rules..." or a hyphen "Friends with Benefits - Rules for..."? One thing I'm unclear about on this topic is stop words and plurals. I've been told before that Google ignores stop words, but results for searches with or without the word "how," for example produce very different results... Same thing with plurals. In any case, all of the above is assuming that the quality of the content would not be affected in either case...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corp08030
