TRAFFIC
IS USER-GENERATED
CONTENT DEMOTING
YOUR SITE?
Even the most respected websites are being de-ranked by Google because of content they haven’t
produced. JJ Grice of Branded3 explains how to avoid falling foul of the search giant’s strict new criteria
THIS YEAR HAS BEEN PACKED
with unconfirmed algorithm updates as
Google looked to ramp up its efforts to
understand site quality. The first of these
updates rolled out in February 2017.
This was followed in March by another
perceived update, which adopted the name
“Fred” and was believed to be a further
refinement of Google’s understanding of
site quality. Other updates have rolled out
during the year and these seem to have
mainly affected sites lacking in quality.
How does Google assess
site quality?
In September 2015, John Mueller (Google
Webmaster Trends Analyst), said: “From
our point of view, our quality algorithms
do look at the website overall, so they do
look at everything that’s indexed. And if we
see that the bulk of the indexed content is
actually lower-quality content then we might
say, ‘Well, maybe this site overall is kind of
lower quality. And if you can tell us that this
lower-quality content shouldn’t be indexed
and shouldn’t be taken into account, then we
can really focus on the high-quality stuff that
you are letting us index.’”
The key message in the above statement
is that Google will look at the whole website
when determining its level of quality.
This approach does not establish quality
on a page-by-page basis. Instead, Google
is applying an overall quality score across
an entire domain based on the standard
of “the bulk of the indexed content”.
“If Google discovers a set of pages that lack enough quality,
in theory these pages could be dragging the rest of the
domain down, regardless of how useful other pages are
deemed to be”
This effectively means that brands need
to be extra careful when it comes to the
content they’re producing and what they
are allowing Google to crawl and index.
If Google discovers a set of pages that
lack enough quality, in theory these pages
could be dragging the rest of the domain
down, regardless of how useful other pages
are deemed to be.
Forums and community websites
are vulnerable
Forums have historically come under
a lot of scrutiny in relation to their value
to SEO. This is primarily because of the
lack of maintenance that these sorts of
pages usually suffer from. Coupled with
this, user-generated content within a
discussion board is often not considered
factual, which might also affect the level
of trust and quality that Google places in it.
An example of how forums and
community-based websites have become
vulnerable over the past year can be found
in OLBG . The OLBG brand is built on its
community heritage and is one of the most
popular forums in the betting industry.
However, since the beginning of 2017 the
domain has lost up to 30% of its visibility
and the site has slumped to its lowest point
in five years (see Figure 1).
Analysis of the pages that Google has
indexed on the OLBG site shows that over
40% of these reside within the OLBG
Figure 1: The five-year decline of OLBG’s SEO visibility
iGB Affi liate Issue 66 DEC 2017/JAN 2018
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