I enjoyed it very much.

Do you have an explanation for Indeed.com’s overwhelming presence in the Google’s serps? It seems that this ‘ask.com of jobs’ has found the right mixture of scraped content, user generated content, reviewing and internal link structure. But when one uses Google for finding a job it looks like Indeed is practising reversed engineering of the results. Some cached queries even show a low match on keyword density level, compared to other more relevant sites. So when and how does relevance become a decisive factor for Google? Do you think that keyword stemming is of more influence now, since the latest Panda update.

This article will surely be featured in my next post.

Regards,
Nauf Sid

glad to hear about the content curation experiment and that it worked so well. I think that the days when you would give all you had on the site for Google to index are kind of dying. Nowadays probably it is better to curate the content that you may be interested in ranking and not having all irrelevant content pages indexed in Google in order to keep their index clean and the best picture about you in Google.

Great post. I’ve been referring back to it for weeks.

What if you don’t have 1 million pages of thin or duplicate content but you do have some? I own several sites in the web design space. Clearly Google sees the content as thin because they took up to 50% of the traffic on various sites with Panda 4.0. It’s hard for me to know which posts to remove.

Over the past year I have noticed there is so much duplication of content going on in the space and I have been trying to fight against it. For example, for one keyword I found that over a 4 year period I had 7 posts that were basically saying the same thing with different players mentioned etc. Since it was just curated content with no real differentiation in the posts I had my writers post a new larger and more authoritative post and then 301 redirected the old posts to that one. The results were very good. It become my top post and is still top today.

However, the “deranking” of panda 4.0 still took away 50% of the traffic on that post. I have about 7k pages indexed. If I go and start removing duplicate content (I assume 301 redirecting to the best version on my site is ok) and deleting stuff that is very thin are you saying that at some point I might see a lift everywhere?

Are any expert SEOs reviewing sites for this very thing and making recommendations about what to delete, redirect, etc?

Topical Authority is mostly about the content on the entire site. And here I was referring to the entire site as being an authority in a specific niche or niches.

Another site that seems to have benefited significantly from this latest algo update is AllBusiness.com. I think it fits with your conclusions #2 and #4. What’s interesting about their content is that much of the most highly ranked seems to be author-less reference information rather than how-to or expert opinions. Example: a glossary of business terms or a list of “top business ideas” (but without an author).

This goes against the idea that associating an author (person with “authority”) benefits the content’s visibility. (Reading through the patent you mention, I thought it might add more weight to authorship.)

But it does support your idea of “Topical Authority” for the site. In this case, AllBusiness does have a long history of relevance and authority in their space of small business information. And they cover this topic extensively. So it seems their overall authority for this topic space has been recognized better by Panda 4.0 and thus boosted their visibility.