Does integration of external supplemenatry data help or hurt regarding googles perception of content quality? (e.g weather info, climate table, population info, currency exchange data via API or open source databases)
-
We just lost over 20% traffic after google algo update at June 26.
In SEO forums people guess that there was likely a Phantom update or maybe a Panda update.The most common advice I found was adding more unique content. While we have already unique proprietary content on all our pages and we plan to add more, I was also considering to add some content from external sources. Our site is travel related so I thought about adding for each city page external data such as weather, climate data, currency exchange data via APIs from external sources and also some data such as population from open source databases or some statistical info we would search on the web.
I believe this data would be useful to the visitors. I understand that purely own content would be ideal and we will work on this as well.
Any thoughts? Do you think the external data may rather help or hurt how google perceives content quality?
-
Everett, thanks so much. Also the link for the quality rater guidelines was very interesting and useful.
-
iCourse,
It used to be that Google told their Quality Raters to look for "Supplementary Content". This has recently been removed from their Handbook for Quality Raters, and you can learn more about it here: http://www.thesempost.com/updated-google-quality-rater-guidelines-eat/ .
That said, they probably removed it because people were showing unrelated supplementary content, or because QRs were marking pages with lots of supplementary content and very little unique body content as "High Quality", which they are not.
In your case, all of the ideas you presented sounded like useful added information for someone on a local vacation or real estate page.
-
Hi Patrick, thanks these are very useful links for an audit. Also the Barracuda tool is great.
In our case we are already quite confident that our focus should be adding more content to our about 1000 city category pages.
My core doubt right now is really: Shall I as a quick first step add now to the city pages the mentioned data from external sources or may it rather hurt in the eyes of google. For visitors it would be useful. -
Hi there
What I would take a look at the algorithm updates and line up your analytics with the dates. Barracuda actually has a great tool to make this easy on you. Note what pages dropped the most. From there, I would look the following resources:
- How To Do a Content Audit (Moz)
- Link Audit Guide for Effective Link Removals & Risk Mitigation (Moz)
I am not so much worried about tools and plugins (as long as they are credible and you're not abusing them) as much as I am that usually travel sites that have to cover a lot of cities using the same content simply switching city names out. I would review duplicate content best practices and make sure you're not inadvertently abusing this tactic.
Let me know if this helps, happy to help where I can! Good luck!
Patrick
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
-
Implications of posting duplicate blog content on external domains?
I've had a few questions around the blog content on our site. Some of our vendors and partners have expressed interest in posting some of that content on their domains. What are the implications if we were to post copies of our blog posts on other domains? Should this be avoided or are there circumstances that this type of program would make sense?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visier1 -
Google images
Hi, I am working on a website with a large number (millions) of images. For the last five months Ihave been trying to get Google Images to crawl and index these images (example page: http://bit.ly/1ePQvyd). I believe I have followed best practice in the design of the page, naming of images etc. Whilst crawlng and indexing of the pages is going reasonably well with the standard crawler, the image bot has only crawled about half a million images and indexed only about 40,000. Can anyone suggest what I could do to increase this number 100 fold? Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTay0 -
Google webmaster tools showing "no data available" for links to site, why?
In my google webmaster account I'm seeing all the data in other categories except links to my site. When I click links to my site I get a "no data available" message. Does anyone know why this is happening? And if so, what to do to fix it? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nicktaylor10 -
E-Commerce Selling Air Filter. Only 3 Qualities Options in 50 Sizes, Total 150 items. HELP!!!
My online store is selling air furnace filters. We only have 3 different filters to sell. (standard, mid-range quality and high quality) Each filters is available in 50 different sizes. This is a TOTAL of 150 products or 3 products with 50 options!!! My store is setup with the ''150 products'' option. MY PROBLEMS: All the page Title are the same, only the filter is change in the page title. ex: 10x20x1 furnace filters - shop at furnace filters canada 12x20x1 furnace filters - shop at furnace filters canada 14x20x1 furnace filters - shop at furnace filters canada ect... It is the same with the Meta Description, all the same only the size change. It is the same with the product description, all the same, only the size is changing. Trying to come out with 150 different page title, meta and product description is almost impossible. And you know like me, most shoppers will use there filters sizes in there keywords search term or phrase. YES, I have duplicate content all over my store. Is there a solution to this? This is my online store http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/ Thank you, BigBlaze
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
404 for duplicate content?
Sorry, I think this is my third question today... But I have a lot of duplicated content on my site. I use joomla so theres a lot of unintentional duplication. For example, www.mysite.com/index.php exists, etc. Up till now, I thought I had to 301 redirect or rel=canonical these "duplicated pages." However, can I just 404 it? Is there anything wrong with this rpactice in regards to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
Pages with Little Content
I have a website that lists events in Dublin, Ireland. I want to provide a comprehensive number of listings but there are not enough hours in the day to provide a detailed (or even short) unique description for every event. At the moment I have some pages with little detail other than the event title and venue. Should I try and prevent Google from crawling/indexing these pages for fear of reducing the overall ranking of the site? At the moment I only link to these pages via the RSS feed. I could remove the pages entirely from my feed, but then that mean I remove information that might be useful to people following the events feed. Here is an example page with very little content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andywozhere0 -
Do you bother cleaning duplicate content from Googles Index?
Hi, I'm in the process of instructing developers to stop producing duplicate content, however a lot of duplicate content is already in Google's Index and I'm wondering if I should bother getting it removed... I'd appreciate it if you could let me know what you'd do... For example one 'type' of page is being crawled thousands of times, but it only has 7 instances in the index which don't rank for anything. For this example I'm thinking of just stopping Google from accessing that page 'type'. Do you think this is right? Do you normally meta NoIndex,follow the page, wait for the pages to be removed from Google's Index, and then stop the duplicate content from being crawled? Or do you just stop the pages from being crawled and let Google sort out its own Index in its own time? Thanks FashionLux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Site: on Google
Hello, people. I have a quick question regarding search in Google. I use search operator [site:url] to see indexing stauts of my site. Today, I was checking indexing status and I found that Google shows different numbers of indexed pages depends on search setting. 1. At default setting (set as 10 search result shows) > I get about 150 pages indexed by Google. 2. I set 100 results shows per page and tried again. > I get about 52 pages indexed by Google. Of course I used same page URL. I really want to know which data is accurate. Please help people!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Artience0