One of the most common pieces of advice the SEO industry gives anyone hit by Panda is to delete as much low-quality content on the site as possible. But what Panda strategy should you use if you don’t want to delete content? Every digital marketing consultant should have a plan B, because not all clients are willing to go with plan A.
The Low Quality Content Blog
Suppose your client has published a blog for the last five years. And suppose they’ve had a pretty aggressive publishing schedule–3 posts per day, 5 days per week, 50 weeks a year. They now have 3750 posts.
The problem is that each of these posts was 250 words long. None of the information in any of these posts seems trustworthy. In fact, it’s all shallow, redundant content with overlapping topics and only minor keyword variations.
It’s exactly the kind of content that Panda targets.
The Stubborn Client
Asking the client to delete that content and start adding fresh new content that’s more in line with the Panda content guidelines seems like an obvious place to start. But if your client has spent $20,000 or so on those low-quality posts, she might be reluctant to just delete them all. What do you do?
Potential Solutions
I can think of several potential solutions to this issue. I’ve listed and explained a few of them below:
Move the Low Quality Content Blog to a New Domain
Suppose this blog is tacked onto the client’s website at example.com/blog/. One potential solution would be to move the 3750 posts to exampleblog.com. Keep the static content at example.com–chances are the site only has a dozen or so static pages.
Convince the client to focus on improving the quality of the pages on example.com. Have them add insightful analysis. Have them consider other presentation signals that might inspire more trust from the Panda algorithm. Explain that these changes to the main site will also provide a better user experience for the client’s customers. It’s a win-win. The client keeps all the content she has invested in. And her main website no longer struggles under the weight of that low-quality content.
Consolidate the Low Quality Posts to Create High Quality Posts
I’ve seldom read a low quality post that didn’t offer some value to the reader. So work with the client on consolidating some of these low quality posts to create lengthy, high-quality posts. Based on the numbers above, the blog has a budget of at least $75 per week for content. Combine and rewrite a week’s worth of posts into a single high-quality, lengthy, authoritative piece of content. Rinse and repeat.
This is a long term strategy that should see results over time. (If you’re rewriting/combining a week’s worth of content at a time, you’ll need 5 years to finish the project.) Tell your client this upfront. You might even be able to convince the client to increase the content budget to see results sooner. With a budget of $375 a week, you could finish consolidating these posts in a single year.
Launching a new site from scratch while engaging in this strategy on the old site might even provide more value for the client. One of my earliest and best SEO mentors explained to me that it’s never too late to start doing things right. The new site can be a source of customers and also a source of referrals to the old, Panda-penalized site.
Focus on Other Traffic Sources
Your client might dislike either of those strategies, for whatever reason. Maybe they involve too much work or too big of a financial investment. In that case, focus on building traffic to the site from other sources.
Optimizing better for Bing and Yahoo is one strategy. Look at the referral data for those two search engines to discover which content on the client’s site performs best in those two search engines. Then focus on building more content like those winning pages. The pages driving traffic from those two engines might be quite different. Bing and Yahoo both cater to different demographics who use different keyword phrases to find content.
Building traffic from social media sources is a reasonable approach to take, too. It’s rare that a client with a Panda downgrade is optimizing as effectively for Twitter and Facebook as she could be. Take her by the hand and help her tap into the massive traffic that’s available via these two sources. You can get several ideas about how to get more traffic via social media in this post.
Improving the client’s referrals via links from other sites is critical. Eric Ward has been preaching about the power of using links to drive traffic to a website for years now. Real links drive traffic. When your site gets 90% of its referrals from sources other than Google, (See this article from 2003 where Eric talks about getting traffic from 6800 different links to his site.) Panda doesn’t seem like such a big deal anymore.
Redesigning the Website
Michael Martinez has written extensively about how the Panda algorithm is almost certainly driven by presentation of content rather than the actual quality of the content itself. Design factors might result in more positive answers to that famous list of Google Panda questions. Work on those too.
What aspects of the site’s presentation might affect the average user’s answer to the Panda survey questions? We don’t know the actual factors, but it’s bound to be a combination of factors. Things to try might include:
- Embedding more images in the content pages
- Embedding unique images in the content pages
- Embedding larger images in the content
- Including an author byline on every store
- Including detailed information about the authors of the content
- Including information about the editors of the content
- Including information about the site’s editorial policies
- Including graphs and charts with the content
- Embedding videos in the content
- Increasing the number of links in the site navigation
- Decreasing the number of links in the site navigation
- Making the links to the pages about who runs the site more prominent
- Changing the background color of the site
- Changing the font size and/or color for the site
- Redesigning the logo/header image for the site
- Changing the layout of the content versus the sidebar
- Increasing the amount of information in the footer
- Decreasing the amount of information in the footer
Launching a New Content Strategy Moving Forward
The client clearly has a budget of $75 per week (or more) for content. Encourage the client to focus on publishing one high-quality, lengthy, insightful article each week. Ditch the 15 low-quality, useless pieces of content each week strategy. Over time, the quality of that content should cause the entire site to rise in traffic.
Whether that rise in traffic will compensate for the lost traffic because of the Panda downgrade is irrelevant. All SEO projects have to start where the site is at now, not where it was yesterday.
SEO’s almost always go into a situation with a best strategy. Professional SEOs will be prepared with 2nd best and 3rd best options, too. You can always find ways to help a client, even an unwilling one.
You might also be interested in Michael’s post at SEO Theory about Kickstarting an SEO Campaign. He shares his thoughts on having a “Plan B” there. It’s well worth your time.
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