Best, longer articles draw no traffic, but shorter, less useful do!

[coachm]

This is driving me nuts. I lost about 80% of my traffic, whether it was Panda, I'm not sure, since it looks like it happened in the later update. The site has various sections, a FAQ section with shorter content (all original). A library section (now on a sub-domain) that is "curated" and contains links and short summaries of hand picked articles we think are good (contains some summaries taken from the actual article)

A video section, with about 10 YouTube vids, plus thin text.

And, of course the articles section which is in a directory like example.com/articles-topic-blah. All original. Mostly unique tho there might be a few older ones that are also on one or two of our other sites.

All the "lesser content" (Faq, vids, library) doing well for this time of year.

THe articles section (longer material) = nothing.

No adsense. No third party ads on almost the whole site.

Left sidebars on most pages, and on all the articles the left sidebar contains promo stuff on two of my books, and pictures of each, links going to amazon.

I honestly don't get this. Just finished spell checks, fixed all broken links. Checked WBT and found something like 700 bad links, which was result of an feed.rss file containing what was basically junk with hundreds of links leading nowhere (obviously a misconfiguration problem, but wouldn't affect the articles section any differently than the others.

So, while I wait for the fixes to "hit", apart from praying, anyone have suggestions about what else to look for?

[coachm]

Getting closer to a cause, but darned if I know why this is happening. I'll add it here.

When I spider my site to create a sitemap, I'm getting urls related to the problem directory/pages that look like this:

example.com/topic-adjective-articles/../topic-adjective-articles/filename.htm

which, of course is creating duplicate (url's) to the same page.

Both the proper one, and the example above actually work, of cours, which is why they aren't caught in link checking.

BUT I can't find the cause. I use dreamweaver as my editor.

[walkman]

coachm, maybe, just maybe time will fix it. Even Danny Sullivan suggested that Google might have a waiting period. I know it's heresy to say it here but he speculated that if you have fixed, panda came and nothing happened, Google might be waiting.

Or maybe the new subdomain did it? It has no Panda penalty /bad score or whatever?

So, while I wait for the fixes to "hit", apart from praying, anyone have suggestions about what else to look for?

Have you tried prayer? ;)

On my Pandalized site, the pages that had more content on Panda day rank better when adjusting for external links (I have some pages that have several direct links so they don't count)

[edited by: walkman at 4:22 am (utc) on Jun 29, 2011]

[lucy24]

Oh, this sounds familiar. There have been a couple of other posts in assorted forums reporting similar problems. Generally they can be traced back to malformed relative links. Everyone ends up in the Apache forum asking how to clean up the resulting mess.

Why do the improper forms work? Usually they wouldn't, unless you'd got some rewrites in place to send people where they're supposed to be-- and you wouldn't have done that unless you already knew the problem existed. Does dreamweaver first make up garbled links and then gratuitously give you an htacess to fix its own mistakes? :)

[martinibuster]

I understand that you're using dreamweaver, but how are those URLs being generated? Is it through a CMS?

[coachm]

Thanks, guys. I finally tracked down the problem. Dreamweaver is a wysiwyg editor. Sometimes in design mode, if you delete things, like a link, it's easy to not delete it completely, and you can make an "invisible" link that has no text.

By going through the code, I found a malformed link (lucy24, right on the nose) that went to a page with all relative links making any crawler index not only the malformed (but invisible) but also all the links on the page the malformed link went to.

So, I fixed it. The question is whether I should 301 the "directory"

example.com/topic-adjective-articles/../topic-adjective-articles/filename.htm

It seems to me that's the only way to get this out of SERPS, since the link works in either form. Make sense?

I'm NOT sure that's the cause of my long articles not appearing, though.

[suggy]

coachm - I have a similar experience

At the start of June, I added lots of extra content to some article-style pages on my commerce site.

This was real, genuine, written by me (so I know it's unique) content. AND, unique images that appear nowhere else on my site or the web (not library shots, not shared with affiliates).

The result, every page tanked (dropped signifantly) !

I am starting to think that Google just does not want to see this kind of content on my site.

The blog portion of the site (run on obscure blogEngine.net), seems immune/ OK. But article stuff elsewhere could be a no-no...?

If we think in terms of the decision tree model, maybe this kind of content just increases the probability that you are a content spammer?

[Planet13]

If we think in terms of the decision tree model, maybe this kind of content just increases the probability that you are a content spammer?

This is the OPPOSITE of what I am seeing since Panda - on one site, both my ecommerce pages AND my article pages are UP since Panda 1.0 hit the streets.

The MOST popular page on my site is an ecommerce page, followed by a closely related article page.

However, conversion rates have slipped. So I believe that I am getting more traffic at the expense of less qualified traffic (i.e., more researchers, less buyers).

[tedster]

maybe this kind of content just increases the probability that you are a content spammer

That could be a decision node, followed quickly by some counter-balancing data point, possibly user data.

[suggy]

The weird thing for us is that we've had some of our articles picked up by CNN and BBC radio. I've done interviews to camera on the back of them!

But, I see thin affiliate websites and me-too commerce stores that can't even be bothered to write about their own products, suddenly doing better than us.

As I've said before, we tend to write much more than the norm which now appears to be to no benefit.

[walkman]

But, I see thin affiliate websites and me-too commerce stores that can't even be bothered to write about their own products, suddenly doing better than us.

ding ding ding! Felt that way since early April and I have gone down each update. Did what Google asked 'more effort' and got rewarded.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I'm getting a suspicion that outbound links became more important when talking about anything that your site is not the source of. example: Sell Nike shoes, or write about them, but don't link to Nike? Not good.

It makes sense too. If Google thinks you're talking about widgets but you don't link to the site Google knows makes them your article isn't as complete as it could be. Accreditation - a new SEO factor?

With relation to this thread, the sites getting away with little original content vs LOADS of copied content do mostly link to the source where they 'borrowed' the content from.

[tedster]

Sgt_Kickaxe - does that "suspicion" come from looking at data for a lot of websites or only a few individual incidents?

[lucy24]

The question is whether I should 301 the "directory"

example.com/topic-adjective-articles/../topic-adjective-articles/filename.htm

It seems to me that's the only way to get this out of SERPS, since the link works in either form. Make sense?

I don't think g### knows or cares whether any given page is real or spurious, they've just got a computer saying you've got two of the same thing. Better redirect 'em and make sure nothing anywhere is making any more bogus links.

[coachm]

Lucy, I redirected. At this point, with almost zero traffic to the long articles, nothing to lose.