Low quality pages are pages that don't contribute much to your SEO. In most cases, these pages add little value to your visitors. You can have different types of poor quality pages on your website, sometimes without even knowing it.
Like thin content (pages with little information and duplicate content) pages that present the same information as on other pages. Especially that the latter can penalize you, if you want to rank well.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to fix bad quality pages. But before, if you have never installed WordPress discover How to Install a WordPress Blog in 7 Steps et How to search, install and activate a WordPress theme on your blog
Then back to why we are here.
What is a page with poor quality?
In general, pages with fine content are not useful to your visitors or to search engines. It could be because these pages contain little information, or just contain an image, like most attachment pages in WordPress.
These pages are only used as a placeholder for an actual image. They are often linked by clicking, for example, on an image from a WordPress blog.
See also our 6 tips to better protect the WordPress dashboard
The second type of low quality content is duplicate content. The same goes for duplicate pages: they add little value. Their content is already in the Google index, on your website or on another website.
These low quality pages can have a big influence on the rankings of your website. Google could even penalize you for having them.
Discover more How to Become a Successful Blogger and Make Money
In addition to these indicators of poor quality content, there is a third problem that you can fix yourself: poorly written content. Google gave us some sort of lists control. I think most of what is there is still relevant.
Colibri
This is the new update from Google. The rankings of many websites have been affected by this update. The Colibri update handles quality control, so to speak. If your website has a lot of low-quality pages, you can bet Google will find them someday.
Discover also our 5 Google tools to use on your WordPress blog
All of a sudden your ranking will drop to a lot byplaces in Google results. You will not know why, and then you will remember this article. It could be that poor quality content.
As Google has incorporated this update into its algorithm, it is sometimes difficult to find the exact reason for the drop. But be sure to analyze if you have poor quality pages first. It seems to me that around the world if Google considers the majority of your pages to be thin, it will lower your rankings.
How to identify poor quality pages
It is quite difficult to give you the best tip, or application to identify which pages you want to deal with because we are talking about all the pages that are not helping Google and your visitors.
If we are talking about duplicate content, this is something that you can easily find. But you might have duplicate content without even knowing it! Tools like Copyscape are your first help, but please investigate a little more yourself.
If you want to exclude attachment pages from WordPress, you just need to query your website in Google:
If you use it as a query (replace example.com with your domain), and it will return all the attachment pages that are indexed for your website (or none which is good):
site:example.com inurl:attachment_idScreaming Frog
One of the main tools that I myself use to identify low quality content is Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Even being in English it works quite well on French content. After browsing a website for a while you will learn what the default page structure is, maybe you can remember the URLs of the main pages and their structure.
10 WordPress plugins for social media marketing to discover absolutely
When you run a search engine query for your website, you get a list of all the URLs for your website. Now go through this list and visit every url that doesn't make sense to you. The point is, poor quality pages often come in clusters, not just one page.
See also our 9 WordPress plugins to restrict access to your content
Think of the line from old .html pages where you end your URLs with a trailing slash. Think of attachment pages, think of everything with too many numbers. These should all catch your eye. Visit the page, find out if poor quality content shouldn't be on Google.
Test if these pages are indexed and see if there are more pages like these. Just do it like this and if you're present you'll find these shoddy pages in no time.
How to fix low quality pages
Here's where the logic comes in, and you'll need to trust your gut one way or another. You will need to determine if you still need these pages and what to do with them if you don't.
Delete pages (periodically)
The first step will be whether you need these low quality pages. It is not a one-off maintenance; I recommend that you do this, for example, once a year (depending on how much content you write each year, obviously).
See also our list of 10 WordPress plugins for social media marketing
If you're using a content management system, it's best to check your posts first, a long time ago. If you find any items that are no longer in use because they no longer affect your current business, it's best to delete them.
What to do with URLs? If they're still getting a decent amount of traffic, redirect them. For a similar page or post if possible, otherwise to a category or tag page, and if all that doesn't match, to the home page.
See also: Content is not king ... here's what it is!
If there is little or no traffic, simply delete them and let Google find the 404 or 410 error message. Your page will disappear from the search results and Google will be able to focus on the relevant pages on your site. web instead.
noindex
If the page itself still has relevant links to other parts of your website and has traffic due, for example, to links from other websites, why not use noindex, follow in your meta tag for robots.
See also Why should you use a content blocker in WordPress?
This way Google will be able to find the page, follow relevant links, but it will keep the page itself out of the search results. Note that this is a different approach than just deleting the page.
Write better content
The obvious would be to write better content, write unique content. Try to become la source people instead of copying this source. If you write unique, insightful and useful content, people will be much more likely to share and link to that content on social media.
Discover also our 3 Content Creation Strategies for a Better Blog
Google will see this content as added value to their index. You will have a lot to do yourself, but the Yoast SEO plugin also guides you through the readability analysis.
All this will give Google a website that really helps their visitors, and in the end, reply: simply to their question. Once you've cleaned up all the poor quality content and all the high quality pages from Google, you will know that you have taken another step towards higher rankings.
Discover also some premium WordPress plugins
You can use other WordPress plugins to give a modern appearance and to optimize the handling of your blog or website.
We offer you here some premium WordPress plugins that will help you do that.
1. Divi Builder
Divi Builder is a high quality page builder highly rated by Elegant Themes. Although usually used as part of the WordPress Divi theme, Divi Builder is also a standalone plugin that you can use on other WordPress themes.
Unlike the previous two builders, Divi Builder allows you to edit your content using a visual interface on the front-end as well as an interface on the back-end, although most users prefer the first interface. .
Also read our guide on: How to optimize your images and improve your SEO
Basically, instead of the sidebars, everything is in popups and floating buttons. It gives you access to 316 pre-designed templates spread across 40 different presentation packs, as well as the ability to save your own designs as templates.
Also discover our tutorial on: How to translate your WordPress blog into several languages
One of Divi's traits has always been the control of the styles he gives you. On three different tabs, you can configure various settings, including responsive controls, customizable spacing, and more.
You can even add custom CSS, as its CSS editor includes basic validation and auto-completion. One of the criticisms of Divi Builder has always been that it relies on shortcodes. Which means that if you disable it one day, it will leave a bunch of shortcodes in your content. Although this is a little depressing, it is less of a problem now that plugins like Shortcode Cleaner exist.
Download | Demo | Web hosting
2. Gravity Forms Complete Auto (+ address field)
It is an extension of Gravity Forms which activates an autocomplete feature on your form fields. Thus, it suggests possible completions for the domain that the user has started entering.
Auto-completion simplifies and speeds up the process of filling out the form and saves your users time by finding the data they need through suggestions.
Also take the time to read our article on 10 WordPress plugins to interact with your users
Please note that you will be able to choose a source for the suggestions. And currently, it supports multiple types of sources: 'WordPress', 'URL', and 'Address'.
Download | Demo | Web hosting
3.Search Bar Ads
If you already love WooCommerce, you are going to love its Search Bar Ads extension. This simplified solution takes advantage of WooCommerce to sell advertising. This WordPress Plugin WooCommerce premium will allow you to promote all your pages through the search bar of your WooCommerce website.
Its main features are among others: the purchase of ads and banners on frontend, the Payments managed by WooCommerce, statistics on user-visible banners, and more.
Download | Demo | Web hosting
Recommended Resources
Find out about other recommended resources to help you build and manage your website.
- 8 WordPress plugins to integrate a billing system
- 7 WordPress plugins to optimize website caching
- 10 WordPress plugins to optimize the search function
- 10 WordPress plugins to create mega menus on a website
Conclusion
Here ! That's it for this tutorial, I hope you will now know what to do to have better content. If you have suggestions or remarks, leave them in our section Comments.
However, you will also be able to consult our resources, if you need more elements to carry out your projects of creation of Internet sites, by consulting our guide on the WordPress blog creation.
Feel free to share this article with your friends on your favorite social networks.
...
