Does integration of external supplemenatry data help or hurt regarding googles perception of content quality? (e.g weather info, climate table, population info, currency exchange data via API or open source databases)

[lcourse]

We just lost over 20% traffic after google algo update at June 26. 
In SEO forums people guess that there was likely a Phantom update or maybe a Panda update.

The most common advice I found was adding more unique content. While we have already unique proprietary content on all our pages and we plan to add more, I was also considering to add some  content from external sources. Our site is travel related so I thought about adding for each city page external data such as weather, climate data, currency exchange data via APIs from external sources and also some data such as population from open source databases or some statistical info we would search on the web.

I believe this data would be useful to the visitors.  I understand that purely own content would be ideal and we will work on this as well.

Any thoughts? Do you think the external data may rather help or hurt how google perceives content quality?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

What I would take a look at the algorithm updates and line up your analytics with the dates. Barracuda actually has a great tool to make this easy on you. Note what pages dropped the most. From there, I would look the following resources:

• How To Do a Content Audit (Moz)
• Link Audit Guide for Effective Link Removals & Risk Mitigation (Moz)

I am not so much worried about tools and plugins (as long as they are credible and you're not abusing them) as much as I am that usually travel sites that have to cover a lot of cities using the same content simply switching city names out. I would review duplicate content best practices and make sure you're not inadvertently abusing this tactic.

Let me know if this helps, happy to help where I can! Good luck!
Patrick

[lcourse]

Hi Patrick, thanks these are very useful links for an audit. Also the Barracuda tool is great.
In our case we are already quite confident that our focus should be adding more content to our about 1000 city category pages.
My core doubt right now is really: Shall I as a quick first step add now to the city pages the mentioned data from external sources or may it rather hurt in the eyes of google. For visitors it would be useful.

[Everett]

iCourse,

It used to be that Google told their Quality Raters to look for "Supplementary Content". This has recently been removed from their Handbook for Quality Raters, and you can learn more about it here: http://www.thesempost.com/updated-google-quality-rater-guidelines-eat/ .

That said, they probably removed it because people were showing unrelated supplementary content, or because QRs were marking pages with lots of supplementary content and very little unique body content as "High Quality", which they are not.

In your case, all of the ideas you presented sounded like useful added information for someone on a local vacation or real estate page.

[lcourse]

Everett, thanks so much. Also the link for the quality rater guidelines was very interesting and useful.