I enjoy scouring Reddit to discover interesting SEO challenges people are facing. This not only allows me to try help others, but also helps me improve my own SEO skills by finding solutions to problems I might not have otherwise considered.
Disclaimer: I can only speculate about how Google analyzes and ranks websites. The information provided here is opinion-based and not presented as fact. My hope is that this content will inspire others to explore SEO from a new perspective.
Within the r/SEO subreddit, I noticed this question:
I was interested in finding out if I could see evidence of 45 days worth of content added to the site. I know that sometimes we go through the motions convincing ourselves that we are doing work, when in fact, all we are doing is fooling ourselves.
Naturally, I checked the site and did some digging. Below is my response, which I believe clearly addresses whether the claimed amount of work was actually applied!
I will try break down the three points in my reply even further.
Reply #1
1/ You say you have been adding content for 45 days… but what content? Upon quick inspection, it looks like it’s the homepage that has most of the content, and that (at least to me) doesn’t look like 45 days worth of content.
If you quickly jump to point 2/, I mention that all other pages have no content on them. Therefore I could only speculate the homepage was the page most of the work was done on.
Don’t get me wrong, work had been applied to the homepage. It is a typical service page that had a contact form, reviews, what they offer, how to place an order and “our experts”.
However, if this was the only page work was done on, then maybe the mindset has to shift on working on the other pages too? This would involve building out more content and internally linking so that Google can get a better idea of what the site is about and the service on offer.
In essence, don’t expect Google to know what you are, based on one page alone… especially if you are a new site with little authority. Google has no reason to trust you right off the bat!
Reply #2
2/ If you use the operator “site:site.com” on Google, it will list all the pages you have indexed. The good news is that there’s about 21 pages indexed… the bad news, they are all service pages with no content and a massive 404 image. The point is, Google is seeing a site that has content on one page, but the majority of the pages on the site has no content (no value for users). What’s also weird is that the main navigation on these service pages aren’t working (while the homepage navigation works!?)
As already touched on, I am not sure if Google likes seeing a bunch of pages that are indexed with little to no content. If thin content to pages is an issue, then what will big G think about pages with no content?
Further to this, there was a customised 404 image on each of these page, not exactly a great user experience if anyone landed on the page!
Reply #3
3/ This is probably a little premature as it likely won’t affect you now, as you from the sounds of it, are not getting traffic yet. But when you look at “Our Experts”, these very much look like stock images, and I think your traffic would agree… it doesn’t look genuine and people might not consider your services as a result.
All I am trying to say here is, if the site does generate traffic sometime in the near future, it is vital to make your service look genuine!
People can see that the “team of experts” are stock images and therefore making it unlikely (at least in my opinion) that any of the team members are Drs or have PhDs.
It would be a waste to throw that traffic away!