“From our point of view, our quality algorithms do look at the website overall, so they do look at everything that’s indexed.” – John Meuller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst – Google
You may be surprised to learn that, despite claims to the contrary, many blogs posted to websites as part of broader SEO (search engine optimization) offerings are not actually providing SEO value. For example, a dealership’s recent analytics data showed that blogs posted to the site generated 0.15% of overall organic traffic, over four years. URLs within the /blog/ directory comprise 24% of indexed content by Google for the domain. This dealership has been paying a well-known vendor for this service, and it’s painful to imagine the thousands of dollars that were likely spent on it.
More concerning, however, is what it says to Google about the quality of a website, when the site is frequently updated with thin-content articles (which most are). To give you a hint…it isn’t good. Senior members of Google’s search quality team have regularly espoused the following concept:
Google is assessing the quality of a website based on all indexable content, blog fluff pieces included.
A crude way to imagine this would be to view your homepage as a finger of Johnny Walker Blue. Monthly additions of low-quality content to Google’s index, likely re-used across many dealership websites with only names and locations changing, is like adding mere droplets to that finger of whiskey, from a plastic bottle.
Another, more frequently used visualization, is that of an iceberg:
Removing ice from below the surface allows the portion of ice that is visible to increase. So too does pruning the cruft from websites, in favor of more valuable landing pages.
The key takeaway here that I want to impress on auto dealers is simple: You should not be investing time and/or money in poor quality blog posts, and should delete or noindex those that are.
If you’re looking ways to improve your dealership’s SEO, let’s have a conversation!