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I always find it interesting when a Googler responds to a specific SEO question with an audit like response. By that I mean, if someone complains about their SEO efforts and rankings in Google and Google responds with additional qualification questions, it makes you wonder - what does that all mean.
Let me share an example. In a Google Webmaster Help thread a webmaster for slant.co is complaining his traffic is flat from Google. It has been flat for six months and he isn't sure why because the content improves and more content is added daily. His bullet points are:
- This is a good example page: http://www.slant.co/topics/341/~2d-game-engines
- Been around for about 3 years
- Mostly works like a structured Q&A site with wikipedia elements to it as products are a rapidly changing area and our site keeps up with new releases etc.
- Google traffic is about 350k a month and pretty flat.
- We've done a lot of work on algorithmically noindexing content until it hits a quality threshold. A lot of currently noindexed pages are still in the index (such as our /comments links) unfortunately.
- Our content/community is growing really quickly, around 30/40% each month. We also have 24/7 moderation.
Then he pinged John Mueller of Google about it on Twitter and John's response on Twitter was interesting. He asked "If it's flat for a while, look at the pages with traffic: do they change? do the new ones show up?"
@StuartKearney If it's flat for a while, look at the pages with traffic: do they change? do the new ones show up?
— John Mueller (@JohnMu) June 9, 2016
The response is interesting.
Look at the pages that have traffic and look to see if they change. Look if your new pages are showing up in Google and have traffic.
Makes you wonder...
Forum discussion at Twitter & Google Webmaster Help.
