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
-
50% Organic Traffic Drop In the last 48 Hours
Hello, My site had a 50% decrease in the last 48 hours (9/26/18) and I looking for ideas/reasons what would cause such a dramatic drop. Year to year organic traffic has been up 40% and September was up 30%. The site has a domain authority of 39 according to Moz and keywords positions have been flat for a few months. I made a change to the code and robots.txt file on Monday, pre-drop. The category pagination pages had a "NoIndex" with a rel =canonical and I removed the "NoIdnex" per: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-noindex-rel-canonical-confusion-26079.html. I also removed "Disallow" in the robots.txt for stuff like "/?dir" because the pages have the rel =canonical. Could this be the reason for drop?? Other possible reasons:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chuck-layton
1. Google Update: I dont think this is it, but ti looks like the last one was August 1st: "Medic" Core Update — August 1, 2018
2. Site was hacked
3. All of keyword positions dropped overnight: I dont think this is it because Bing has also dropped at the same percentage. Any help, thoughts or suggestions would be awesome.0 -
Importance of City in Title?
Anyone doing SEO for a local business ever tried to do an A/B test between city name in title and not in title? Seems that if you have a Google Places for Business Listing and have correct NAP on your web pages, Google places heavy importance already on that when determining geographic relevance in their algo. As a business expands, maybe not that far from their original service area but starts to offer services in other nearby cities some of which may be as big of a population as the city the business is located in, it seems to make less and less sense to put city names in the title if not for the basic reason of making the title too long. But what if your primary area is basically three cities and including them pushed your title to say, 90 characters. How much does city name in the title tag matter when you are already coming up the local 3-pack map listing on search results for the relevant cities?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MrSem1 -
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 -
Keywords Directing Traffic To Incorrect Pages
We're experiencing an issue where we have keywords directing traffic to incorrect child landing pages. For a generic example using fake product types, a keyword search for XL Widgets might send traffic to a child landing page for Commercial Widgets instead. In some cases, the keyword phrase might point a page for a child landing page for a completely different type of product (ex: a search for XL Widgets might direct traffic to XL Gadgets instead). It's tough to figure out exactly why this might be happening, since each page is clearly optimized for its respective keyword phrase (an XL Widgets page, a Commercial Widgets page, an XL Gadgets page, etc), yet one page ends up ranking for another page’s keyword, while the desired page is pushed out of the SERPs. We're also running into an issue where one keyword phrase is pointing traffic to three different child landing pages where none of the ranking pages are the page we've optimized for that keyword phrase, or the desired page we want to rank appears lower in the SERPs than the other two pages (ex: a search for XL Widgets shows XL Gadgets on the first SERP, Commercial Widgets on the second SERP, and then finally XL Widgets down on the third or fourth SERP). We suspect this may be happening because we have too many child landing pages that are targeting keyword terms that are too similar, which might be confusing the search engines. Can anyone offer some insight into why this may be happening, and what we could potentially do to help get the right pages ranking how we'd like?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShawnHerrick0 -
Outreach - When is it important to wait vs ask for the link with the first email?
Hello, When is it appropriate to wait till the second or third email to let the person I'm outreaching to know that I want a link? Things I'm giving away: 1. Broken Link Building 2. $100 adwords traffic 3. social sharing of their URL (twitter & facebook)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
How important is it to create a subdomain?
I was just reading an article about how Hubpages claims they pulled through from Panda by dividing their content up on subdomains. I'm wondering if anyone else has had similar success? Also, Panda aside, how important do you think it is to separate different types of content out on separate subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
I have a great idea for a contest that will generate links...but how do I promote it when I have little traffic?
I'm working on a new real estate site and I've got some great ideas to generate links. One of these ideas is a pretty neat contest. (I'd tell you what it is, but really...this is one of those ideas where people will go, 'Man! I wish I thought of that', so I want to do it first before anyone else steals my idea. 🙂 ) The contest involves readers submitting photos and other readers voting on them. I anticipate it will generate some good press both locally and internationally if I can get enough submissions. But, the question is, how do I get contest submissions when I don't have good traffic yet? Once I've got some good submissions, I'll contact some media, spread it amongst my personal fb friends, etc. Any ideas are welcomed!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes1