cut the cruft - everett sizemore - moztalk denver - 2016

Relevancy ≠ Quality

Potential Ranking Factors

• General Content Quality

• Authority, Expertise, Authoritativness,

Trustworthiness (EAT)

• PageRank (PR / Links)

• Brand Reviews / Brand Sentiment

• Engagement Signals

• User Experience

• Keywords and Topics

• Freshness (QDF)

• Diversity (QDD)

• Query Intent

• Location / Local Intent

• Search History / Other Personalization

• Anchor Text

• Search Vertical (e.g. images)

RELEVANCY examplesQUALITY examples

http://SearchEngineLand.com/library/google/google-search-quality-raters

moz.com/search-ranking-factors/correlations

QUALITY INDICATORS TACTICS (How to Optimize for Quality)Grammar, Spelling, Depth… Hire a copyeditor. Learn to write better.

Expertise, Authority, Trust (EAT)

Make content deep and useful. Call out your awards, certifications, news coverage, and use trust symbols. Make it easy to contact you, and easy to find policies like terms of service, returns and privacy.

PageRank (PR) from Links Build high quality links. There are thousands of great articles out there about it.

Reviews Ask your best clients/customers.

Short-Clicks Improve Out-of-Stock pages with in-stock alerts and related products. Be less aggressive with your pop-up strategy. Also see query refinements, pages per visit and dwell time.

Query Refinements Only attract the "right" audience and deliver what you promised in the search results. Choose keywords by relevance, not just volume. Think about query intent.

Dwell Time On Site Make your pages stickier by improving the overall design. Add images, video. Run GA reports on the stickiest traffic sources and develop a strategy to increase traffic from those sources.

Pages Per Visit Improve internal linking, suggest related content, customize 404 pages… Split up long posts into a series.

Conversion Rates Do A/B testing, make your messaging very clear, follow CRO best practices…

Ad Placements No ads above the main content on the page and do not have an annoying amount of ad blocks or pop-ups.

CTR From SERPs Craft better title tags, URLs and descriptions. Grab attention. Gain trust. Make them want to click. Add schema markup when appropriate.

Page Speed Visit https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Mobile Experience Responsive and/or adaptive design, less text, easy navigation, loads lighting fast, shorter forms…

Pruning

Case Studies

Fixed Internal crawl errors & links to redirected URLs

Pruned low-quality pages

Improved some canonical issues

Performed link clean-up and submitted disavow file

96% Increase in Organic Revenue(6 month period)

31% Increase in Organic Traffic28% Increase in Revenue(year over year)

Content audit

Pruned thousands of pages

Link Audit / Clean-up & Linkbuilding

Technical & Content Audits

Pruned over 80% of product pages

77% Increase In Organic Traffic434% More Revenue from Organic Traffic(year over year)

38% Organic Traffic Growth(July-Nov. year over year)

November 2015 was up 76% YOY

Pruned 90% of their blog posts

Pruned URLs had no external links and no traffic in the last 90-days

38% Boost in non-blog traffic800% Increase in Leads

Old blog posts with no traffic were removed via Noindex meta tag.

Recurring event pages were consolidated and the new pages made evergreen

ahrefs performed a content audit on their blog.

They Pruned their blog from 541 posts to 304 posts.

There’s a post about it here: https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-strategy/

Why Pruning Works

Middle 400

Average QR of 35

Bottom 500(aka “The Cruft”)

Average QR of 5

Top 100QR 50

Before Pruning

Site-Wide QualityRank:QR 30

Top 10%(high performing pages)

Middle 40%(average performing pages)

Bottom 50%(below-average performing pages)

Bottom 200Average QR of 30

Top 100QR 50

After Pruning

Site-Wide QualityRank:QR 4033% Improvement

Middle 200Average QR of 40

Pages with some visibility in the SERPs appear above the

water line.

The middle section has very little visibility, but most of the

pages have potential.

The lowest section is cruft:Noise, junk, bloat, crap…

Cruft keeps the other pagesfrom being more visible.

Keep indexed.Improve if necessary.

Weighing down the rest.Remove from the index.Re-release if/when improved.

Prioritize and improve as soon as possible.

Mostly Cruft

No Outstanding Content

Average Content Being Weighed Down Severely

Could probably cut50% of the siteand see immediate improvements

Hidden Diamonds

Smaller site. Little or no pruning necessary.

Potentially great content remains unknown due to lack of promotion and resulting lack of links.

Internal linking needs to be improved.

Good ContentPulled Down by

Dead WeightCommon on large sites

Good content under the surface with little visibility

Average content weight down severely by cruft

Penguins Love IcebergsBut they hate keyword stuffing as much as spammy links.

“Penguin is a webspam algorithm and we try to take a variety of webspam issues into account and use them with this algorithm. It does also take into account links from spammy sites or unnatural links in general... but I wouldn’t only focus on links.” ~John Mueller

Penalized Site

Panda Lurking Beneath the Surface

Heavy Pruning Recommended

Warning!

Not Worth Fixing

You can think it, but don’t say it:

“We do not set our team up for failure.Your site is not worth saving and you should blow it up.”

w w w. g o i n fl o w. c o m / c o n t e n t - a u d i t - s t r a t e g i e s /

@bal ibones

I told you this slide wouldbe online.• moz.com/blog/content-audit-tutorial

• goinflow.com/content-audit-strategies/

• moz.com/blog/pruning-your-ecommerce-site

• What, Why, & How of Pruning for SEO (Bill Sebald Mozinar)

• moz.com/blog/long-click-and-the-quality-of-search-success

• wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/06/10/dwell-time

• link-assistant.com/news/site-quality.html

• deepcrawl.co.uk/

• urlprofiler.com/features-content-audits/

• screamingfrog.co.uk/

• spot.goinflow.com/ecommerce-content-audit-toolkit

• GoInflow.com/about-us/careers/

• moz.com/blog/long-click-and-the-quality-of-search-success

• moz.com/blog/clean-site-cruft-before-it-causes-ranking-problems-whiteboard-friday