Panda Update: Finding & removing low quality content using Analytics
by Patrick Altoft on March 9, 2011
Google has been explaining today that sites hit by the Panda update are likely to be hit on all pages on the site, even if some pages are good quality. They are also telling site owners that the way to get out of the update is to remove any low quality content.
To have a copywriter check through thousands or millions of pages is a time consuming task and even then it’s hard to know whether the changes you make are to the right pages.
The way we are recommending people check their pages is to use the bounce rate and time on site metrics from Google Analytics landing page report.
In Google Analytics go to Traffic Souces > Google Organic > and view by landing page. Then add “&limit=100000″ to the URL so you can download all the data.
Finally click the CSV download and you will get a spreadsheet showing all the metrics for your pages including bounce rate, time on site and traffic for each page.
Next you need to set your CMS to autmatically add the noindex tag or temporarily delete (and redirect to category level) the worst performing pages on your site, 10% at a time, until the traffic picks up or you realise that you have too much low quality content and have to think of another plan. Don’t delete pages that are still getting lots of search traffic, just get rid of pages with high bounce rate, low time on site and very little search traffic, or a big drop in search traffic recently.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.
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