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So since the Penguin update the clients of the company I work for have gradually been losing traffic and money. Noone (except for me) has noticed this yet and connected the dots.

Yesterday we all get called in to have a bollocking and the manager asks the head of our department if he would be confident of being able to get 600+ visitors a day to an 'average website' that has just started up, to which he replied 'yes'.

Since I started here back in February there has not been a single new client that has been able to gain that many visitors (many have not gained even 25% of that figure), which in the post-panda and post-pegnuin world, I find completely understandable.

When I first started here they were using SEO 'tactics' which people used to employ 5+ years ago and didn't even use exact match keyword data.I have had a few talks with them about how SEO has changed over the last few years and they still don't seem to understand that it is now significantly more difficult to gain traffic using SEO than it once was.

If you were asked about the same question, thinking about the 'average' client you might get, would you be confident enough to guarantee that at the 6 month mark they would be getting 600+ visitors a day?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'lower level' pages, but we are able to edit the home page to add a small piece of text such as 'latest products'/'latest brands' etc.

We can add extra pages of content (that aren't product or brand pages) but don't as the company i work for feels that adding a blog or article section will bring in non-converting traffic from search engines, thus the only non-product oriented pages are the basics such as 'contact us', 'about us', 'shopping cart' etc.

Thank you Martin,

The websites are Ecommerce stores so the focus isn't on articles, but the articles are there on each category / brand page in order for search engines to relate the pages to a few keywords, so there's isn't exactly a 'latest posts' or similar feature we can make use of.

All of the pages on the site already have content, but I agree that interlinking between the pages is a good idea, although it's not very scalable as the main focus is on brand pages (so the majority of content for brands will not mention other brand names, thus having nowhere to interlink these).

I work for a local SEO company who are continually adding content to the home page of clients websites. While i do agree that it is a good idea to add content to the home page and to link to inner pages, the home page of several clients exceeds 6,000 or more words.

Every month, an article based on a brand or category (which already has its own page which is optimised with an article) is added to the home page with links to inner pages. I have stressed that it is not a good idea to have so much content on the home page, and even more so that it shouldn't target all the same keywords.

I have pointed out that many of the brand and category pages do not rank well for their keywords, whereas in most cases it is the home page which is ranking instead, which i have suggested this is because the home page is too well optimised for those keywords.

What are your opinions on this? Are you for or against continually adding content (which already has its own designated page) to the home page of an Ecommerce website?

I should also add that this content is within a drop down div box at the footer on some sites and just above the footer on other sites. The category and brand pages also have drop down divs with an article just below the header.