BrightApe SEO

Ever heard that Google loves regularly updated content? As a result of this you probably integrated a blog to your site and updated it daily with useless posts solely aimed at increasing your websites position in SERPS.

If you are doing this, you are effectively creating a content farm, full of useless content. You are just leaving yourself vulnerable to be penalized by Google.

If you want to spend more time updating your site, you should concentrate on writing quality posts that adds value to your website or blog. Each post should be unique and well written. The better you write your post, the more people will link to it. It is definitely better to write one post and get 100 links, than to write 100 posts and only get 1 link. Content is king and quality is queen, both go hand in hand to give you top rankings and returning readers.

Let your content reflect your site

The quality of your content reflects the quality and authority of your website in Google’s eyes. Google’s Amit Singhal quoted that “improving lower quality pages or merging them with higher quality pages could improve the higher quality pages ranking”, so in other words if you have low quality pages, it could be having a detrimental effect on your whole websites rankings in SERPS.

What you should do

You should be pro-active in writing your blog posts. Before you choose something to write about, you should go through each of your existing posts and ensure that you have not written about this topic before. If you have and you don’t feel that the post is up to scratch, delete it and completely start it from scratch, or you could add useful bits into your new post. This is definitely a good idea for webmasters to improve their rankings; go through each of your posts, remove ones with duplicate topics or collate them into new, more useful, higher quality posts. It doesn’t matter if it reduces the amount of pages on your website. Quality beats quantity all the time with SEO.

Rand wrote a good blog on who the winners and losers are from the panda update by having a quick read of this, you will notice that sites with potential lower quality content (such as article sites), have been affected really negatively by the Google Panda Update.

Good ways to find bad content

Google analytics is a great place to start when looking for content that isn’t performing. As Google has access to all this information, it is not impossible that it doesn’t use it as a ranking factor.

Make a list of pages with high bounce rates and low amounts of time spent on them. Then go through these pages to determine which ones you should consider deleting or improving the quality of. Once you have improved the quality, you should keep track of how the bounce rate differs and keep looking to better the quality of content on each page of your website.

Conclusion

The Panda update will hopefully have a very positive effect on the amount of good quality content on the web and reduce the amount of low quality content, content scrapers and low authority websites who get rankings in Google.

With algorithm changes such as the Panda, we’ve seen Google focus over the recent months on improving the volume of high-quality sites shown within the SERPs.
Algorithmically, Google accesses the quality of a site which leaves the question – what exactly counts as a high quality site?

Google’s latest post on the “Official Google Webmaster Central” blog details 23 questions that the Google bots could be asking themselves when they knock on your site’s door. Take a look at the post from the Webmaster Central blog here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

For those of you who are too lazy to read through that article, here’s the questions:

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
• How much quality control is done on content?
• Does the article describe both sides of a story?
• Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
• Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
• Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
• For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
• Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
• Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
• Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
• Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
• Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
• Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
• Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

If you’ve been Google slapped as a low-quality site, don’t expect to be ranking as per usual any-time soon. Matt Cutt’s was asked how long a user can expect to regain traffic after they’ve completely re-worked the site and this was his reply:

“short version is that it’s not data that’s updated daily right now. More like when we re-run the algorithms to regen the data.”

Better late than never though, right? If you’ve been hit, don’t sit back and expect everything to be fine. If Google is a major source of traffic for your site, bend over and give in to Google. Ask yourself the same questions as they’ve listed on the webmaster central blog (and more!). Do you have spelling errors, factual errors, low-quality content? Even if you have one article on the site that Google sees as low quality it could be affecting the rest of the site so get rid of it!

If you haven’t been hit yet, don’t sit back either…future proof yourself.

Don’t take these questions as gospel, because they’re not. They’re no means a requirement – don’t go grabbing SSL for your forum because you read “Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?” use common sense – like anything with SEO.