Welcome to the Q&A Forum

How many comments/shares is many? What % should we be chasing?

We're not doing content for SEO, it is intended for readers rather than botbait and Google Analytics is showing a few million pageviews and month, so the site is not sat unloved, but The Board wants moar traffic!

Sorry if I was vague, I guess I assumed that since I was posting a question on here, then it was implied that I was unhappy with performance. Are many people on here asking questions about stuff they are happy with?

I am guessing a deep analysis is not something you can teach in a quick forum response if its not likely to be a quantity issue I guess I need to have thoughts and meetings off line and come back with more specific questions? - I don't have permission to share too many details about the site in question

hehe can I take the fifth?  Seriously though, the new stuff will be closer to gold than crap I think (plus moz reports give us a lot of As) but even hypothetically if it were crap, would 50 tonnes of crap do worse than 5? Or does the stopped clock being correct twice a day come into play?

Is it possible to have too much content? If so, how do we prove (or at least get evidence) one way or the other to whether we are being adversely affected in the SERPs?

The only way we could think of is to publish a lot less for a week or two, but nobody is willing to risk it.

Numbers wise we are publishing an average of 125 articles a day, with an archive of around 300k fwiw

thanks

I don't understand how dates would help? Was it not clear that the red lines are the dates of algo updates?

By abstracting the data the hope was to gain insight into how to read the graphs in relation to updates, and not just get help related to specific updates which wouldn't help much the next time we have to deal with a traffic drop problem. More a question of who to think rather than what to think.

Trying to read between the lines are you saying different algo changes take different amounts of time to kick in and that's why a more detailed graph is more useful? For example if #1 was the first penguin change, would your response be different if it was the first panda change?

The attached graph is from google analytics, a correlation of about 14 months of Organic Google visits with algo changes, data from moz naturally

Is there any way to tell from this which will have affected the site? for example #1 or #2 seems to be responsible for the first dip, but #4 seems to fix it and it broke around 6, or is the rise between 4 and 7 an anomaly and actually 1 or 2 caused a slip from when it was released all the way to when 7 was released.

Sorry if the graph is a little cloak and dagger, that is partly because we don't have permissions to reveal much about the identity, and partly because we were trying to do a kind of double blind, separating the data from our biases

We can say though the different between the level at the start and end of the graph is at least 10,000 visits per day

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Hi Jen

We are in the fortunate/crazy situation where we have a custom CMS so the actual redirects are not really a problem from a technical standpoint, it is just wondering if we should

The main site - the biggest and busiest - has a discussion board and a shop, and a blog which the others don't so the articles are about 10% of the indexed content, and about 11% are unique.. the other 2 sites, one has 0.003% unique articles and the other 1.829% ... sounds pretty bad when I put it like that!

We haven't seen a noticeable dip, just general disappointing performance, I think I will try and rope someone into doing a full CSI on the data

Have you seen anywhere that has recovered from a comparable situation? The pondering at this end was that the damage was already done, and that was that.

thanks

Yeah it would be frustrating if we got penalised for a meta tag a google module had added! If you can get crawl error filtering added to the wishlist for that that's be great

thanks for your time

I am looking for some proof, or at least evidence to whether or not sites are being hurt by duplicate content.

The situation is, that there were 4 content rich newspaper/magazine style sites that were basically just reskins of each other. [ a tactic used under a previous regime ]  The least busy of the sites has since been discontinued & 301d to one of the others, but the traffic was so low on the discontinued site as to be lost in noise, so it is unclear if that was any benefit.

Now for the last ~2 years all the sites have had unique content going up, but there are still the archives of articles that are on all 3 remaining sites, now I would like to know whether to redirect, remove or rewrite the content, but it is a big decision - the number of duplicate articles? 263,114 !

Is there a chance this is hurting one or more of the sites? Is there anyway to prove it, short of actually doing the work?

Thanks for the response. We are currently experimenting with alternatives to mod_pagespeed for other reasons so I can't send a reliable example as we experimenting, but google have one of their own http://www.modpagespeed.com/lazyload_images.html?ModPagespeed=on&ModPagespeedFilters=lazyload_images

<noscript></span><span><meta HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="0;url='http://www.modpagespeed.com/lazyload_images.html?ModPagespeed=noscript'" /><style><!--table,div,span,font,p{display:none} --></style><div style="display:block">Please click <a href="http://www.modpagespeed.com/lazyload_images.html?ModPagespeed=noscript">here</a> if you are not redirected within a few seconds.</div></span><span class="webkit-html-tag"></noscript>

The SEO Moz crawler has found a number of 500 error pages, and 404s etc which is very useful

however some of the urls are weird/broken formats we don't recognise and nobody remembers ever using - not weird enough to imply hacking, but something broken in the CMS

Is there anyway to find out where the crawler found these urls? I can patch up and redirect the end result as best I can but I would prefer to fix plug the leak

thanks

hehe can I take the fifth?  Seriously though, the new stuff will be closer to gold than crap I think (plus moz reports give us a lot of As) but even hypothetically if it were crap, would 50 tonnes of crap do worse than 5? Or does the stopped clock being correct twice a day come into play?