Weekly SEO news: 3 July 2018
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Here are the latest website promotion and Internet marketing tips for you.

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Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. Thin content on your website: how to find it and how to fix it

Since Google's Panda algorithm, pages with thin content do not rank well on Google's search result pages. How do you identify thin content on your web pages, and what should you do with that content?

identify thin content on your website

What is thin content?

Thin content pages are pages with less than 400-500 words that do not have a clear focus. Some people also consider unoptimized pages, duplicate pages and outdated pages thin content.

How to identify thin content on your web pages

The website audit tool in SEOprofiler helps you to find thin content pages on your website. Just run a website audit and then open the page 'Content topics' in the audit report:

how to identify thin content

The audit report shows thin content pages on your website, and it also shows the top keywords that are used on your web pages.

What you should do with your thin content pages

There are four strategies for dealing with thin content pages: do nothing, update the pages, redirect the pages, or removing the pages.

1. Do nothing

You don't have to do anything if the page gets many website visitors and/or if the page is ranked well on Google and other search engines. Of course, the content of the page should be up-to-date.

2. Update the page

If the content of the page is relevant but not up to date, update the page to make sure that it is relevant to your current offerings.

If the content is relevant but not detailed enough, add more information about the topic on the page. Make sure that the web page plays a relevant role in converting visitors on your website.

Updating content is less work than creating new content. In additions, the old pages usually contain some backlinks. When updating a page, you can also add videos, infographics and other content that makes the page more linkworthy.

3. Redirect the page

If you have another page on your website that contains a better version of the same content, just redirect the thin content page to the rich-content page.

4. Remove the page

If the content of a page is outdated, or if it does not comply with current regulations, it might be a good idea to remove the page from your website.

This should only be done if it is not possible to redirect the old page to another page of your website that is up-to-date.

Check your web pages regularly

Updating or replacing content that doesn't provide value for your customers is always a good idea. You should also check the redirects on your website. One bad redirect can lead to massive problems.

The website audit tool in SEOprofiler regularly checks your web pages and it informs you about all issues that can have a negative impact on your rankings:

Check your website now

2. Internet marketing news of the week

GoogleGoogle's latest webspam report
"One of the trends in 2017 was an increase in website hacking—both for spamming search ranking and for spreading malware. [...]

Another abuse vector is the manipulation of links, which is one of the foundation ranking signals for Search. In 2017 we doubled down our effort in removing unnatural links via ranking improvements and scalable manual actions. We have observed a year-over-year reduction of spam links by almost half."

Featured snippet churn documented

"425 of the keywords we tested never showed a featured snippet on desktop, and 888 never showed a featured snippet on mobile. This is in spite of the fact that our prior studies have shown these to have featured snippets. 1567 of the keywords on desktop used more than one site for returning a featured snippet during the course of the study. [...]

The keyword that showed the most variability was, 'what is day student tuition.' During the course of the study we saw 12 different domains used to provide the featured snippet for this keyword. This keyword also went 8 days without any featured snippet."

GoogleFive years of Google ranking signals

"Just because we have a patent on something, doesn’t mean we are using it. [...] Some of the patents I have blogged about have not been implemented by Google yet but could be.

A company such as Google files a patent to protect the intellectual property behind their ideas, the work that their search engineers and testing teams put into those ideas."

New report: Some ad campaigns are almost entirely robot traffic

"In some campaigns, more than 90 percent of the clicks are generated by robot traffic. [...] The good news: The firm only detected 32 percent of robot traffic for ad clicks overall in the past year, down from last year. But, as recently as April of 2017, that figure was 85 percent. [...]

Some of the higher percentages come from publishers, the report says, who are 'buying traffic from questionable sources and consequently delivering more robot clicks.'"

+++ SEARCH +++ ENGINE +++ NEWS +++ TICKER +++

  • Meet the man whose job it is to reassure people that Google search isn’t evil.
  • How to exclude IP addresses in AdWords.
  • New ways to explore with Google Maps.
  • Google AdWords is becoming Google Ads.
  • Bing Ads: Automated extensions, powered by AI, help improve your ad’s visibility and performance.
  • Google exec says Microsoft beat search giant to buy GitHub.

3. Previous articles

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