Content Audit After Google’s Panda Update
There are a lot of webmasters that were affected by Google's latest update to the algorythm. I was one of them as two of my sites saw around a 40% drop in the traffic received from Google's organic search. It's still early, but after reading as much as I could about the different sites that were affected and testing those findings against what I found with my sites I decided to make a few changes.
The Old Way
Previously, I had a couple of sites that were listed in Google News. For these sites, my content strategy was focused more on producing in bulk. We tried to get to around 300 words of unique content centered around our niche and the hot topics currently going on. I wanted my writers to fly through and get as much content posted as possible. As a result we saw huge spikes in traffic when something was picked up, but I'd say that the traffic was fairly low quality. I had recently decided to move towards more evergreen content and less news related stuff since the conversion rates were so much higher. However, I had a lot of articles on my site with a low word count.
The Content Audit
The keyword centered around this Panda update has been "quality." Now my short news stories were all uniquely written and covered what they needed to cover, almost always with links pointing to more detailed sources.
The problem was that they were very "thin" because of their shortness. Since Google is looking for more detailed, thoroughly researched content I decided to go through and delete everything under 500 words long. I thought 500 words was the safest choice, but if there was a piece of content under 500 words that I thought was useful, had links, and was high traffic then I marked it for an update instead of deleting it.
Step 1: Delete all posts under 500 words long (or shorter if you aren't comfortable with this number.)
Next, I knew that I had a pretty poor incoming link count in relation to how many pages were on my site (check Webmaster Tools for you incoming link count). The true sign of "quality" is supposedly having other webmasters linking to your content with the understanding that other sites won't link to crap.
Since I was producing so much stuff, I didn't really worry too much about working on building links to my site and thus have a lot of pages with no incoming links. I didn't want to get rid of everything without an incoming link though because I thought if it's useful, I can at least try to work on getting some links to it.
The final step I took was to pull up Google Analytics and look at my traffic numbers. If a page had received less than 100 visitors over the past year, then it's not doing a lot for me and was a candidate for deletion.
Step 2: Delete all posts with 0 incoming links and less than 100 visitors over the past year
One of my two sites lost more traffic than the other. The site with the biggest traffic loss I feel like was benefiting more from the authority given to large sites. It's not that I was penalized as much as I had a lot of links passing anchor text juice to my landing pages. On that site I didn't have as many external links coming in to those landing pages, and saw a huge drop as a result.
Step 3: Work on getting more links to your content
I'm writing more guest posts and am engaging more in the community in the hopes of getting more links to my sites. I'll let you know how this pans out.
July 29th, 2011 - 02:36
I would not suggest just blanket trashing old content. Google respects the age of content, and does not like it when old content 404′s.
I suggest all articles be at least 500 words from now on, but deleting all old articles may be shooting yourself in the foot.
If you have the time, and go back and find truly bad articles that justify trashing/redirecting, those I suggest managing.