UGC News articles

[designrfix]

Hi! Quick question regarding UGC...

On our site - http://designrfix.com - we have a /news section (which contains about 40 000 news items) - shown in the right sidebar at the bottom

I recently changed the /news (and all subpages) section to noindex and asked a removal on Google Webmaster Tools...  was this a good idea? Those pages are low content pages and the bounce rate is really high since all articles are external sites.

[EGOL]

I have a similar section on one of my sites and I believe that it was part of a Panda problem in one of the early Panda updates.   I used noindex / follow on those pages and the site recovered in a few weeks.

On that site I have about 150 category pages and they pull in a ton of traffic.

Your posts seem to include some UGC and they appear to be receiving followed links.  Perhaps linking to bad neighborhoods is an important concern.... and a lot of your internal links are nofollowed.   If this was my site all of the internal links would be followed and the external UGC links would be nofollowed.

[designrfix]

Thanks EGOL!

I've put back the /news items as "noindex, follow" and as well as some internal links.
ps. All of our external links are nofollow.
pps. I had to put some disallow rules in our robots.txt to remove the news category and pages. I'm guessing i still have to keep those rules in place correct?

Last question... would you also keep pagination as "noindex, follow" or open it all up?

[EGOL]

I've put back the /news items as "noindex, follow" and as well as some internal links.

Yes.  I think that is an improvement.

ps. All of our external links are nofollow.

I didn't realize that.  Good idea on a blog where users can submit items.

pps. I had to put some disallow rules in our robots.txt to remove the news category and pages. I'm guessing i still have to keep those rules in place correct?

I allow the category pages on my blog to be indexed.  They bring in thousands of visitors per day.

Last question... would you also keep pagination as "noindex, follow" or open it all up?

On my sites the pagination is noindex follow.

A couple questions for you...

Do you receive a lot of user submitted news items?

Do you think that you get a lot of spam submissions?    How much time do you have to spend weeding the spam?

[designrfix]

Great thanks again,

We get between 40 and 50+ per day and yes i take the time to weed out all the spam, which is almost always 1/3rd of submissions. quite time consuming. (a few hours a day)

[EGOL]

Thanks for sharing that.

I have thought about opening our news to visitor submissions.  Right now we do it all ourselves (about eight to ten items per day).

I worry that visitors will submit a lot of spam and self-promotion that will decrease our quality.   If weeding takes a few hours per day then we are better off doing it inhouse.

Thanks again for sharing.