Thin Content Pages: Adding more content really help?

[WebServiceConsulting.com]

Hello all,

So I have a website that was hit hard by Panda back in 2012 November, and ever since the traffic continues to die week by week. The site doesnt have any major moz errors (aside from too many on page links).

The site has about 2,700 articles and the text to html ratio is about 14.38%, so clearly we need more text in our articles and we need to relax a little on the number of pictures/links we add.

We have increased the text to html ratio for all of our new articles that we put out, but I was wondering how beneficial it is to go back and add more text content to the 2,700 old articles that we have just sitting.

Would this really be worth the time and investment? Could this help the drastic decline in traffic and maybe even help it grow?

[EGOL]

Just saying what we did...

We had a site that was hit by panda.  We had lots of very short news blurbs and some republished content from government agencies and academic institutions - much of that done by their request for exposure to our visitors.   Immediately after the hit, we noindex/followed or deleted/redirected the republished content.  We also noindex/followed or deleted all of the short content.  The site got out of panda a few weeks later.  Some traffic loss but  not substantial

As for improving short content.  We have done a lot of that.  We had lots of very short descriptions of two sentences plus one or two images that were getting nice amounts of traffic.  We improved those to a few hundred words and two or three images (very time consuming, very expensive - a few hours per page.  The rankings for short tail queries went up nicely and there was a huge increase in long tail traffic.  We later started improving the few hundred words plus two or three images to one to two thousand words plus four to eight images - even more time consuming - a day or two per page.  Again, rankings and traffic go up nicely.

Today, for each new article that I publish, I am making a huge improvement to a page that is a proven traffic getter but could be improved a lot.

For you, take a look at the traffic into those 2700 old articles prior to your panda problem.  Some might not be worth much, but others might be golden.  Then decide what to delete/redirect, what to noindex/follow, and what to improve.  Then begin working.

Good luck.