Published:
Updated:
by Wayne Smith
The majority of webmasters do not consider search engines customers for their content. If they did, they may see many opportunities to promote their sites by strategically addressing search engine pain points. Google's webmaster guidelines is a good place to start.
Some of these challenges stem from the search engine's algorithms, while others result from the content or SEO strategies used on web pages.
This article is written from an SEO perspective but also draws on experience with document retrieval systems and vertical web search engine operations.
Flooding the SERP page with duplicate content is a pain point.
Duplicate content, syndicated content, soft 404 pages, and keyword cannibalization unless dealt with are a pain point that floods the search results with the same material ... giving no value to the client.
The option provided to the search engine is to select the best, AKA the first result, and remove or penalize the results that don't add value.
Duplicate content should be removed by using either or both robots.txt or the canonical tag.
Syndicated content is harder because two or more sites controlled by different publishers are involved. The canonical should point to the original publisher. Google Search may ignore the canonical and use the most authoritative publisher, removing or lowering the lower-ranking page.
The site or content publisher needs to avoid keyword cannibalization. It does not benefit the client to have many similar pages on the site talking about the same topic. Every page should have a gain of information or significantly different materials to provide value both for clients and search engines.
The page with lower user engagement is likely to drop in rankings or be dropped for the keyword being cannibalized.
Soft 404 are pages created by the server that have no unique content. These pages should be no-indexed.
Thin Content Pain Point
When a user clicks from search to a site looking for information -- And the content on the page is nothing more than basic information -- the user is dissatisfied.
There is no clear-cut rule a webmaster to use to measure how thin the content on a page is. No specific word count - although many webmasters self-impose the word count must be over 500 words.
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