Your Opinion: Thin Content? Should we Retire this section?

[HLTalk]

Only way to explain this was to make a video.

Would love everyone's input on this:

https://youtu.be/TcdaOvz24Aw
Thank you.

[Joe.Robison]

A few thoughts - pretty good explainer video, I would imagine that would take a ton of time to write!

First impressions on user profiles:

• From looking at a few of the profiles, it seems like you'd be missing out on a lot of good user data if you simply retired these profiles permanently. From a search engine perspective, it sounds like they're not bringing in much on their own. But there's also qualitative and quantitative data that you can glean from all of those profiles to inform and create content, charts, data, reports, etc for your site. You can map out all the user profiles to create personas for your site. You wouldn't want to trash these and lose the data.

• I do see the point on the content being somewhat thin, but thin content pages don't always harm your site if they're serving a purpose on your site. If you look at Moz's profile pages, some of them aren't very meaty if the users haven't contributed many posts or comments. So it should be evaluated on a case by case budget.

• What you can do - and I believe Moz does - is if the user hasn't been active in the last year, you deactivate/archive their page until the user signs in again. That way you only have active user pages. Conversely, you can leave the profiles up but just automatically noindex those pages that aren't being used so that the crawl budget isn't being wasted. Another idea is to automatically noindex some of the pages under a certain word count threshold.

• Yes the user profiles may be eating up your crawl budget when Google crawls the site, so you wouldn't necessarily want the profiles being crawled above other important pages if the crawler is hitting it's limit. Check out Search Console to see the crawl activity and stats (under Crawl Stats)

• It looks like you have 8,000+ profiles currently indexed - which is both good and bad. Good because it's proof that Google is able to crawl all of those profiles and deems them worth indexing. Bad if you don't want all of them indexed or to waste your crawl budget.

• You are write that all of the title tags are the same. I would automatically rewrite those and run a 90-day experiment to see if you can actually get some long-tail organic traffic to those profiles. Perhaps in aggregate they can actually bring in some traffic. Or maybe you'll learn after 90 days that they just don't rank for anything and so aren't worth spending time on.

• One thing I noticed is that you don't have an XML sitemap designated in your robots.txt - https://www.hairlosstalk.com/robots.txt I would add multiple XML sitemaps to your robots.txt by creating a sitemap index. The WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast does this well for your WordPress pages, but you should make sure your shop and profile pages get their own XML sitemaps as well.

• You should submit all sitemaps in Search Console and track the page indexation % for each XML sitemap.

• You should also run a cohort report in Google Analytics to see if those with profile pages on your site have higher engagement rates than non-users and let that inform your decision as well. Do they purchase more than others? Visit more often? You don't want to chop off a community that contributes to the health of your site and revenue.

• From a UX perspective, it's a funk thing to have your headers and design different among the WordPress, Magento, and Blogs sections. I'm sure you're aware of that, but it's definitely something that stands out.

• Action items:

• Rewrite all title tags on user profiles (auto generated is ok) and test for 90 days to see if the traffic changes

• Also optimize the profile pages with on-page best practices as well

• Generate XML sitemaps for each section of your site, and submit them in Search Console

• Create some type of programmatic way to deindex old or extra thin profile pages

• Run cohort reports on profile page owners vs anonymous visitors

There's your free mini-site audit! Let me know if you have other questions!

[HLTalk]

Wow!  Thank you so much for such a comprehensive and thoughtful reply.

You're right, its on a very old CMS system, and not only does it not have an XML sitemap, but I'm certain there are duplicate content issues, improper pages being indexed (contact, member list, etc) and a hundred other issues.  This process of cleaning up the site and upgrading it has resulted in us finding mass quantities of the above issues due to these very old CMS systems that were made prior to "duplicate content" and other things being an issue.

I will take all your recommendations to heart and get started right away.

[Joe.Robison]

Sounds great! Let me know what impact you see from the changes, curious to hear!