Be brutily honest - What do you think of this old content?
-
My website reports on news relating to certain web hosting providers, and being hit by the latest phantom update a little I am looking back a little more harshly on some of my content with especially the older articles needing alot of work (I know some areas on the site need work), and there are some articles I am just not sure about.
I have listed a few OLD articles below
https://www.besthostnews.com/the-power-of-shared-web-hosting-by-bluehost/
https://www.besthostnews.com/siteground-sponsors-wordcamp-london/
https://www.besthostnews.com/free-ebook-guide-to-starting-a-website-on-a-budget-a-small-orange/
These are 3 old articles that I have previously updated several months ago, but are they good enough. Due to the nature of the site sometimes I will report on certain news \ features that a web host releases, and sometimes there is very little to write about. These are probably a good example where I feel there is a struggle to write enough or the quality is perhaps lower than something that has more information to report on.
I would appreciate some harsh critical view points \ and perhaps suggestions on how to improve my writing style for these kind of generic style posts.
-
I think you are right here... and yes, I think a change of strategy is required in light of the way Google is heading with this latest update and how other similar sites are suffering.
I am starting to formulate a plan, and your response kind of reinforced it.
-
The articles look fine to me.
I don't know much about the hosting industry or how many people are searching for this type of news.
I have a site that has been covering the news of an industry for about 10 years. When I started covering the news, I wrote articles like you are writing. They were a lot of work and the content was not evergreen.
After doing that for a year or so I decided that my time would be better spent by: 1) writing more evergreen articles covering basic information about the industry, and, 2) making brief posts (two sentences and an image) of news items and linking to the original source. That used my time for more profitable purposes (evergreen articles can pull traffic for years) and still satisfied my visitors' interest in news. In fact, the number of people subscribing to the news blog rose rapidly because I linked to six to ten stories per day instead of writing one or two. Lots of people began arriving at my site and clicking the news link. The number of people subscribing to my email and RSS feed quickly rose into five digit numbers.
A couple years ago the site slipped rankings in one of the Panda updates, even though I was purging old news posts once or twice per year. I assume that Google didn't like lots of two sentence blog posts so I noindexed them and got out of Panda within a few weeks.
More recently, I decided to make one post per day that would simply contain a list of about eight links to news items on other sites. This saved more of my time and reduced the amount of skimpy pages on the site. Lots of people still arrive at the homepage and click into the news. People are still subscribing and writing to me with thanks for offering this news as a free service.
I don't know if your audience wants this. I don't know how many competitors you have offering similar news for this industry. I don't know if you are getting lots of traffic from search into your news posts. Those are all items that I would consider. But, I would weigh the opportunity of writing evergreen content instead of ephemeral.
-
Nope, they had a quick spike but if you see my link, they plummeted shortly after. Basically they spoke too soon.
-
No Jonathan. SERoundTable is all safe. Check this post:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-weekend-20247.html -
Yeh, I follow seroundtable, but they also got hammered by this update... probably much more so then I did.:
http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research/domains/organic?acc=154293&url=seroundtable.com&cc=US
-
Hey Jonathan,
I do not find any kind of problem except the size of content which is not a huge problem for me. If you follow Barry Schwartz's SERoundTable blog, he also reports news and releases kind of posts which are generally low in word count.
Are you sure this "Phantom" update causes the traffic down? As far as I know, this update will mainly target to "How-TO" kind of low quality posts.
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
-
Project content marketing SEO value and Traffic
I'm creating a content marketing plan and need to project the visitor impact it could have on an exact-keyword domain name. The plan will produce at least 10 quality, original articles per day. Are there any common metrics or ways to guess what the visitor impact could be?
Content Development | | msantore821 -
How to Submit a Sponsored Content Submission?
Hi, I have some content related to our services and I want to know how to submit or post this content to some online publishers like yahoo, business insiders, etc.. I would appreciate your suggestion on this. Thank you.
Content Development | | Lry880 -
Add a Search box (content hub) for my website?
Hello We would like to introduce a search area in our website, to help our users to find all information regarding a specific topic (landing pages, infographics, blogs, videos, etc...). Before we decide to build everything internally, we were wondering if there is any widget or plugging to make this in a smooth way and that works fine. I have also seen that Google offers a custom search option to make this happens. I would really appreciate advice about what to do regarding this topic: Is there any company that offers a really good solution for this? Is worth to use Google custom search option? Or the best option is build it internally? PS: I have seen that there are many plugins for wordpress, but our site is not a wordpress blog. Just to clarify. Many thanks for your help 🙂
Content Development | | AutoEurope0 -
What are the best widgets to use on Wordpress? And what is most useful on Wordpress for content syndication?
We are in the process of researching the best plugins and widgets for our clients' blogs. It appears that SEO by Yoast is most popular for 2013 so far. Any recommendations on which widgets we should be using or plugins for content syndication? If we use something like the Jetpack plugin, would this do the trick?
Content Development | | qlkasdjfw0 -
Content Marketing Strategy for a Solar Panel Shop
Hi everybody Everybody's talking about content marketing strategies these days and the videos from MozCon has definitely been a great inspiration for me. I have a customer who sells solar panels (wiki) here in Denmark and they are more or less hooked on the idea of investing long term. And this is where I wanna ask you guys for ideas to this strategy. I'm open to anything from overall guidelines to specific ideas on content. I hope you will chip in, thanks a lot 🙂
Content Development | | loevgaard0 -
Duplicate Content
I am wondering what is the best way to show google that there is duplicate content on the page. for example on our product pages they are unique content except we give the same guarantee and promise on every product providing some duplicate content. What is the best way to fix this issue?
Content Development | | DoRM0 -
Is it possible to over create/post content?
My company has signed up with a vendor to help write content. They are going to be supplying 50 articles per month so we'd basically be adding 2 or more articles per day. Is that too much or is that okay as long as it's quality content?
Content Development | | baudvilleweb0 -
Wordpress hacked. Entire content wiped out
Someone hacked my Wordpress site, wiped out all my content and changed my login status to a subscriber. Years of hard work gone, I can't log in to fix anything. Is there anything I can do. Is there a way to prevent this from happening ever again. Is there a way to catch these people?
Content Development | | ArenaS0