Mods note: Poster's description line was... This is about page quality and page results POST Algorithm Changes - - -
I just wanted to send an update about the main site I work on and its major changes since the last 3 updates (Phantom and 2 Core Algo Updates)
We know we use
spinners to help create some content. You can talk about spinners all day, but every multi-million dollar company uses them - Our competitors use them and so on. We however, use them for more than just some meta info, or NEW pages that we need to customize. We use them for an additional 100-600 word captions (descriptions) along with manufacturers descriptions.
Our competitors only use manufacturer descriptions (no spinner caption). I have said that the company goal should be to manually create those and have campaigned for it since I started 10 months ago. The spinners we use are very good and DO provide benefit to our visitors - but they are spinners.
The owners/managers objections to NOT using spinners is legitimate- How do you create custom "everything" for a million pages and over 500,000 product pages? It is a legitimate question. Anyone investigating patters of Meta Tags on a popular site (name any of them) and you'll see they use spinners/formulas, etc.
So anyway, I ran some numbers as far as the loss of visibility and then did some Vlookups on content quality. We have 60% of our pages customized and about 40% spinner. Below you see the numbers for Landing Pages both before and after the Algorithm Updates, etc. This is based on about 18,000 landing pages before and 14,000 landing pages after. (shorter time period since I wanted to find out as fast as I could).
- - - - - - - - -Manual - - - - Spinner
Before Algo... 83.7% - - - - - 16.3%
After Algo.......96.4% - - - - - 3.6%
This doesn't mean that all the pages were replaced with manually created content pages - we lost visibility, which means pages that might have been showing up are not at all.
As a consequence, our average position improved from 9.6 to 8.8 (based on about 300,000 page views)
This is NOT because overall, we improved. Pages that were ranked 50th, 78th, 92nd - simply disappeared, thereby getting rid of poor performers.
CTR also increased slightly - again, same reason - poorer performing spinner pages disappeared and stopped poisoning the well. Bad CTR from spinner Title Tags exist at a much smaller rate.
From a revenue standpoint - this is bad. lower click-through rate still creates some click-throughs and thereby conversions.
Our
Unavailable Product Pages (80,000 of them) still results in 8-10 percent of our traffic and some of those lead to additional (related products) page visits and revenue.
Perhaps more to come. Just wanted to share 4 things:
1. We got hit
2. It's about time
3. Working to fix it
4. Will keep you up to date (if you want)
Also, I plan on the site getting hit badly after Penguin hits. This company has been creating link farms for years with well over a million backlinks from their own sites - some of them listed in the same Analytics accounts... footer links, etc. So we'll see.
* Revenue above 180 million
* 120 Million from SEO alone
* According to Google 2.3 million pages indexed (I doubt it, though)
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:56 pm (utc) on Jan 29, 2016]
[edit reason] Added description line, fixed some formatting [/edit]
