Panda Update: What is Stale Site Content
There are a lot of old, stale pages on the World Wide Web. With the new Panda update, these pages can affect your site’s ranking. Does your website, blog, or eCommerce site have any pages that haven’t been updated in a while? If so, this could be one of the reasons why you fell in the rankings.
So, what can you do about it? Well, there are a few approaches you can try. Choose the strategy that best matches your comfort level and your needs.
Update your page
If your site hasn’t been updated in a while, now is the time. In general, Google always liked to see fresh, updated content. It doesn’t matter if you have a blog or a traditional website – as long as the content is updated, then this should help.
One thing that categorizes this latest update is that Google is focused on increasing the user experience. The average user became frustrated by the types of content that the search engine would bring up.
Dead and nonexistent content is useless to your visitors. Fixing the situation makes both Google and your visitors happy. To prevent this from docking you in the future, make it a habit to constantly update your website.
What to do with unused/old pages
Do you have some pages on your site that you don’t even want anymore? You have a few ways you can deal with this. The first is to delete the page from your site entirely and then take no further action. However, this can penalize you because the page is already indexed. Rather than accept the penalty, you can delete the content and then set up a return 404 or a 301 redirect. Don’t just use the default message, however. Come up with your own way of telling people that the page will be redirected.
Unsure that this matters? Think about this – how many times have you clicked on an article on a site hoping it will give you the information you need, only to find that the page doesn’t exist anymore? It’s a frustrating thing for the user when this happens, unless there is actually some kind of redirect set up. Since Google knows this, they’ve started to penalize sites unless the redirects are set up.