Cleaning up the cruft
It should be common knowledge that you need great content to improve search engine ranking for your site. However, you really need to consider the harm that could be being caused by leaving poor content on your site as well.
Lots of information to digest here on ways to handle that.
Originally shared by Rand Fishkin
Google Can Seriously Hurt Sites That Let Low Quality Content Build Up
http://bit.ly/CleaningCruft <---- This week's new Whiteboard Friday covers how to ID and fix those issues before they cause problems.
But how do you define ‘great content’ Alan Stainer ?
As the old saying goes _beauty is in the eye of the beholder’
How do you measure time on a page?
I’ve got sites open in my chrome tabs that have been open for days. If the site owner looks at the statistics then they will see a time of zero
How do you measure bounce rate and is it that significant?
My bounce rate for recipes is high for the very simple reason that people are looking for something and, despite the quality, the result they found is not what they want so they look elsewhere. I’d rather they stayed and looked further but the fact that they bounce is no reflection on the quality of my site.
Much the same goes for your newspaper column.
I read most and will most likely be recorded as zero time and 100% bounce even though I was actually reading the article for a few minutes then closed the tab when I was finished.
So do the search engines penalise us for creating high quality content simply because people find the answer they were looking for on the first result.?
Perhaps they do
As with anything to do with SEO, we are shooting blind most of the time. We don’t know the specifics of the algorithms that are in use or how they treat individual cases. What we can do is use our best judgement on a case by case basis.
ugyugughghhhy