Yesterday I wrote a story named don't flat line after the Google Medic update - I felt the title was cute and I saw webmaster discussion around the topic of not sitting and doing nothing so I covered it. The story, to say the least, ruffled some feathers within the industry because it said that you should not just sit idle and wait - that even though Google said there is no fix, Google said you should continue to improve your site and build great content. So that upset a lot of people who were hit by this that already have good and awesome content.
I don't blame them for being upset - they invested a tremendous amount of time and resources into building out really great web sites - at least in their minds - and their rankings are gone. Truth is, I looked at a few hundred web sites and the sites were not "bad" - many were pretty great, some were just mediocre in terms of design. In terms of medical content, I have no idea, I am not a doctor. But they did not look like the really poor quality sites hit by the Maccabees update. The sites were not bad at that level.
In any event, people are looking for more specific advice outside of "build great content." While I did post one idea on fixes from a tool provider, not everyone is convince.
I saw in the ongoing WebmasterWorld thread that one person dropped "thousand very old posts that weren't getting any traffic" and saw a few days later a 30% boost in Google organic traffic. He wrote:
My organic traffic is up by 30%. Some days ago i deleted over a thousand very old posts that weren't getting any traffic & used a 410 gone error code so Google will remove the pages ASAP.I don't know if it has anything to do with the increase in my organic traffic or it's just a coincidence.
Has anyone ever experienced growth by pruning thousands of old posts?
It is too soon to tell, but I am curious what you all are trying to do? Take my anonymous poll below:
And yes, that is a Penguin surgeon in the graphic. :)
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
