Typically, when a site has been suffering with Panda ranking issues in Google, an SEO would look at the pages that are not that useful and purge and delete them. But Google is now saying that they do not recommend that course of action. Google is recommending that you fix the content and make it high quality, don't just remove the low quality content.
Gary Illyes of Google said this on Twitter:
@jenstar We don't recommend removing content in general for Panda, rather add more highQ stuff @shendison
— Gary Illyes (@methode) October 7, 2015Truth is, I believe Google has said this in the past. Google's John Mueller said removing content is not always your best bet with Panda. Sometimes it makes sense, but sometimes not.
Now Gary is saying generally it does not make sense to remove content. Generally you should improve your site. But the sites that are hit badly by Panda, often have serious structural issues with the site where they can consolidate content and remove a lot of the pages. I'd say generally, removing or consolidating content is the approach most SEOs take to tackle Panda issues. But Gary is saying otherwise.
Here are some of the tweets from Gary on this topic from last night:
@jenstar We don't recommend removing content in general for Panda, rather add more highQ stuff @shendison
— Gary Illyes (@methode) October 7, 2015@Marie_Haynes twitter is not the right medium for this discussion. we see way too many people cut the good. Careful what you trim #defcon1
— Gary Illyes (@methode) October 8, 2015@pauledmondson use search analytics: look for pages that don't satisfy users' information need for the queries they rank for @Marie_Haynes
— Gary Illyes (@methode) October 8, 2015@Marie_Haynes Thin content: make it better, make it ... thick, and ADD more highQ stuff. @jenstar @shendison
— Gary Illyes (@methode) October 7, 2015@Marie_Haynes going to leave twitter cos I'll never finish my preso, but don't remove content someone might find useful @jenstar @shendison
— Gary Illyes (@methode) October 7, 2015@Marie_Haynes What you really need is content created with care for the users, that's it. Blank pages we'd just ignore @jenstar @shendison
— Gary Illyes (@methode) October 7, 2015How do you guys handle Panda sites and getting them to rank again in Google?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
