How to Figure Out and Handle Low-Value Content?

Today it is more important than ever to check your content, especially with the recent Panda update. Google continues to emphasize the importance of high quality content and user engagement and is only increasing the frequency of Panda updates.

It is crucial to make Panda-proofing your website your priority by regularly auditing the domains for poor content that could have negative impacts upon organic search visibility. Regular auditing of your website should include:

·         Searching for low-value or poor-quality content;

·         Cleaning your low-quality content, i.e. removing it, improving it or not indexing it;

·         Giving priority to publish high-quality, informative and engaging content.

Even if you think you are publishing great content, most websites host legacy content that can be quiet un-amazing. Thus, you need some clean up.

What Is Poor-Quality Content?

Low-value content has several different shades:

·         Poor content – this is content you probably bought for $5 or an article from dollar sites. Also, maybe you used article spinners in order to create  “unique” content;

·         Thin content – when there are pages that are too brief to render useful information. Thus, pages that contain less than a few hundred words can be tricky;

·         Duplicate content – this is content that is similar or the exact version of the same page across different URLs;

·         Expired content – examples of such content can be special offer pages that have expired, or are old job listings, expired real estate listings, etc.

·         Dead content – pages serving 404 error due to content or file that doesn’t exist anymore;

·         Un-engaging content – content users don’t find interesting. Even if it is 100% unique and grammatically sound, it is not necessarily engaging. 

How to Identify Low-Quality Content?

So, what are the methods of identifying potentially toxic content? First of all you should manually review every page on your website and evaluate the quality of your content and its value. Of course it requires a lot of hard work.

Another efficient way is to scale and automate your efforts by leveraging the following tools and tactics.

1. Screaming Frog

With the help of this tool you are able to run a crawl in order to identify three content issues, such as thin content, duplicate content and 404 errors. 

2. Google Analytics

Another method to unearth low-quality content is to analyze user engagement signals in Google Analytics. Usually, poorly written content, low-value content and un-engaging content will show substandard engagement signals, including bounce rater, average time on page, page views, pages per session, and goal completions.

How to Handle Low-Value Content?

Once you have identified low-quality content, you need a plan of action to handle it. This means two things: either you are going to improve it or kill it altogether or probably hide it from search engines. If you decide to keep it, there are some key factors to consider:

·         Does it bring traffic?

·         Does it have inbound links?

·         Does it offer real value?

Thus, before removing any content from your website, be sure to analyze the risks and consequences and evaluate the impact that action may exert.

Source: Rankwinz