Be brutily honest - What do you think of this old content?

[TheWebMastercom]

My website reports on news relating to certain web hosting providers, and being hit by the latest phantom update a little I am looking back a little more harshly on some of my content with especially the older articles needing alot of work (I know some areas on the site need work), and there are some articles I am just not sure about.

I have listed a few OLD articles below

https://www.besthostnews.com/the-power-of-shared-web-hosting-by-bluehost/

https://www.besthostnews.com/siteground-sponsors-wordcamp-london/

https://www.besthostnews.com/free-ebook-guide-to-starting-a-website-on-a-budget-a-small-orange/

These are 3 old articles that I have previously updated several months ago, but are they good enough.  Due to the nature of the site sometimes I will report on certain news \ features that a web host releases, and sometimes there is very little to write about.  These are probably a good example where I feel there is a struggle to write enough or the quality is perhaps lower than something that has more information to report on.

I would appreciate some harsh critical view points \ and perhaps suggestions on how to improve my writing style for these kind of generic style posts.

[UmarKhan]

Hey Jonathan,

I do not find any kind of problem except the size of content which is not a huge problem for me. If you follow Barry Schwartz's SERoundTable blog, he also reports news and releases kind of posts which are generally low in word count.

Are you sure this "Phantom" update causes the traffic down? As far as I know, this update will mainly target to "How-TO" kind of low quality posts.

[TheWebMastercom]

Yeh, I follow seroundtable, but they also got hammered by this update... probably much more so then I did.:

http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research/domains/organic?acc=154293&url=seroundtable.com&cc=US

[UmarKhan]

No Jonathan. SERoundTable is all safe. Check this post:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-weekend-20247.html

[TheWebMastercom]

Nope, they had a quick spike but if you see my link, they plummeted shortly after.  Basically they spoke too soon.

[EGOL]

The articles look fine to me.

I don't know much about the hosting industry or how many people are searching for this type of news.

I have a site that has been covering the news of an industry for about 10 years.  When I started covering the news, I wrote articles like you are writing.  They were a lot of work and the content was not evergreen.

After doing that for a year or so I decided that my time would be better spent by:   1) writing more evergreen articles covering basic information about the industry, and, 2) making brief posts (two sentences and an image) of news items and linking to the original source.   That used my time for more profitable purposes (evergreen articles can pull traffic for years) and still satisfied my visitors' interest in news.  In fact, the number of people subscribing to the news blog rose rapidly because I linked to six to ten stories per day instead of writing one or two.  Lots of people began arriving at my site and clicking the news link.  The number of people subscribing to my email and RSS feed quickly rose into five digit numbers.

A couple years ago the site slipped rankings in one of the Panda updates, even though I was purging old news posts once or twice per year.  I assume that Google didn't like lots of two sentence blog posts so I noindexed them and got out of Panda within a few weeks.

More recently, I decided to make one post per day that would simply contain a list of about eight links to news items on other sites.  This saved more of my time and reduced the amount of skimpy pages on the site.  Lots of people still arrive at the homepage and click into the news.  People are still subscribing and writing to me with thanks for offering this news as a free service.

I don't know if your audience wants this.  I don't know how many competitors you have offering similar news for this industry.   I don't know if you are getting lots of traffic from search into your news posts.  Those are all items that I would consider.  But, I would weigh the opportunity of writing evergreen content instead of ephemeral.

[TheWebMastercom]

I think you are right here... and yes, I think a change of strategy is required in light of the way Google is heading with this latest update and how other similar sites are suffering.

I am starting to formulate a plan, and your response kind of reinforced it.