My primary reason for starting this blog is that I want to keep track of SEO changes we made to our blogs. Google has disliked our blogs for a long time, and we get little to no search traffic from Google. More on this later, but today we deleted a lot of content to see if this can have a positive impact on our search engine rankings.
As Google’s Michael Wyszomierski has stated previously: “Our recent update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, so the key thing for webmasters to do is make sure their sites are the highest quality possible. We looked at a variety of signals to detect low quality sites. Bear in mind that people searching on Google typically don’t want to see shallow or poorly written content, content that’s copied from other websites, or information that are just not that useful. In addition, it’s important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole. For this reason, if you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content”.
Today we removed around 100 blog posts from yournextshoes.com. These mainly contained features of individual shoe styles, many of which are no longer available online, and also information on shoe sales that have expired. Many of the blog posts contained a significant number of outbound links, i.e. links to other shoe retailers. In total we removed about 3% of our content today, so it’ll be interesting to see if this has a positive impact on our search rankings.
One problem is of course that we have no idea how it will take before Google recognizes these changes, and it is possible that Google never treated the deleted posts as poor quality in the first place. All we can do is to guess what their algorithmic reasoning might be, and then do our best to wrestle the Google pandas and penguins.
Source: Google Webmaster Central