Tag Archives: content churn

Handling Blank Review Pages for Better Traffic and Conversion

By richardbaxterseo | Published January 11, 2010

Image created by: PixMix

Almost a year ago, Matt Cutts asked his blog readers to Give Google feedback on “noresults” pages. According to Matt, “The #1 complaint (20+ comments) was “empty review” sites.”, and as far as his post at the time was concerned, empty review pages were in breach of the following Google Webmaster Guidelines:

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.

Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches…  Read the full post...

Using If-Modified-Since and better expired content to avoid 404's

By richardbaxterseo | Published June 21, 2009

On Friday, Rand at SEOmoz asked: “Are 404 Pages Always Bad for SEO?”

Recently, though, Lindsay and I were faced with a tough call on a consulting project. The client has a site that receives a ton of search queries, many of which map to their category and subcategory level pages (which are more landing pages than search query pages, but also serve to address the search keywords). The client also has a number of search pages that have no content (either because they’re for mis-typed, nonsense or mis-spelled searches or because they simply don’t have content for those terms). Some of these pages earn links, some get a moderate amount of traffic and up until recently, they’ve essentially existed as error pages that resolve with a 200 code.  Read the full post...