About the project:
Topic: news resource
Work period: January 10, 2019 - present
Project Features:
Global problems with internal optimization. Problems with the generation of meta data, duplication of pages, the presence of manual sanctions on a poor-quality link profile on the site. Quickly outdated content and a short period of information value.
Objective: increase the number of visitors with organic search. Further work to ensure positive growth dynamics of this indicator.
Success Factors:
• internal optimization;
• connection of micro-marking;
• work with a link profile.
The first stage (1-2 months)
The first step in the work was the removal of manual sanctions. This is done quite quickly and not laboriously when using special services on small projects. But everything is not as simple as it usually seems.
In this case, we had to sort out and review: now we could actively proceed to the next stage of work, to internal optimization of the project.
The second stage (2-4 months)
We started the stage of internal optimization with a technical audit of the site, in which the following shortcomings were discovered that should have been fixed without fail and were critical for this type of site:
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a huge number of outgoing links from the pages of the site;
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duplication of pages with the ending "/" (slash) and without it;
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during pagination, the description of categories was duplicated and the meta data of the pages did not change;
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the time for returning data to pages significantly exceeded the allowable due to the excess information on the pages and the presence in the code of a huge number of unnecessary styles;
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the algorithm for forming the title on the pages was broken, and sometimes completely absent;
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meta tag name = "description" on all pages was empty;
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there was no micro-marking of breadcrumbs and articles on the site;
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increased use of h2, h3 headers on the page for other purposes.
Meta data
As a result, we got a list of problematic issues on the site, the webmaster of which never thought about what SEO is and how to get tangible traffic from organic search.
The first to solve the issue was the generation of meta data, namely Title and Description. To do this, we contacted client-side programmers who were involved in supporting this project. As it turned out, the admin panel was not even able to manually indicate unique meta-data. And this is regardless of the fact that the site was built on a fairly popular CMS, but due to the many custom improvements, this functionality was lost. After a detailed statement of the terms of reference, the programmers realized the possibility of working with meta-data, and the client received valuable recommendations for their further use in creating new material.
For existing material, it was decided to display the first paragraph of each publication in the Description meta tag. This decision was made after analyzing most resources and taking into account the writing style, where the first paragraph had the appropriate number of characters and contained the most useful information about the whole news.
Outbound links
Our news resource, which means that some of the material is inherited from other sites, at best, passing a small rewrite. In order to preserve copyright, you must specify a link to the source resource.
There is another option to put links - the rel = "nofollow" tag or close them in the rel = "noindex" tag. But there are, as always, their own but ... Google takes into account tags and anyway transfers some weight through similar links, and for closed outgoing links you can get pessimization for “Cloaking” (as you remember earlier, our news resource had a huge number of outgoing links). They didn’t count exactly, but about 5-7% of all pages on the site have at least one link from the page.
Therefore, the only true way for us to solve this issue was to turn all outgoing links into internal ones. All our links have acquired the following form: http://domen.com/url/...?http://link.com and are now considered as internal links.
Micro-marking
There was nothing complicated! As mentioned earlier, the site is built on the popular CMS and for the implementation of micro-marking and “bread crumbs” you do not need to reinvent the wheel, but just go to the verified site from there, pour the finished file responsible for the output and structure in the already marked-up version, and upload the file to your server using FTP client.
Program work, оther technical work:
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gluing doubles;
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code reduction;
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transfer javascripts to separate files.
They were carried out by our developers together with the client’s specialists and there’s no point in going into details.
Results:
Above we examined the most significant things. During this period, we also carried out rather small and everyday tasks:
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analyzed site issuance in search engines;
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tracked new links to the site.
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we moved the advertising block to where people used to see other similar news at the end of the news.
As a result, we received:
The user stays on the site longer, reading various news. And just when he was not interested in the news from the top block, he gets on the advertisement at the bottom of the article. For the client this is an extra income, but for us the project budget.
Also at this stage, the client was offered ideas for improvement:
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display sections;
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appearance of email newsletters for subscribers;
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recommendations are given on the conduct of groups in the social. networks;
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creation of a simplified version of the site for easy reading from mobile phones.
Results
After 6 months of work, we, first of all, made the site the way search engines will love it, and as a result will provide good ranking. We have implemented many developments for the internal component of the news resource.
However, analytics speaks for itself: we increased the average attendance of users from the search from 609 421 visits to 2 189 902 visits (excluding traffic from news feeds).
This indicator continues to grow, since all our main comments have been taken into account, and the publication of new content is carried out taking into account all our recommendations.
