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Discussion on: I'm SEO Consultant, Ask Me Anything!

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loukilaymen profile image
Aymen Loukil

Hi Ben :)

Em congrats for the web performance side !

Some quick things :

  • I wouldn't index this type of page : dev.to/rahulchowdhury/comment/af2b which is a part of the main page

  • This page is a duplicate of the main page : dev.to/loukilaymen/i-m-seo-consult...

  • dev.to is mainly based on UGC (User Generated Content) and this is challenging for SEO. It could leads to very light content, spam contents, duplication (user based one..etc)

  • The fact that URLs of posts contain username slug is also risky ...
    Exemple : Your top driving traffic post : dev.to/emmawedekind/regex-cheat-sh...
    It drives 4,683 visits per month (source: Ahrefs). If emmawedekind delete one day her profile, the website will lose the traffic.

  • New user profiles are kind of empty...are them valuable getting indexed in Google ? May be set a rule : If user active + at least 5 posts/comments..index the page and noindex per default..

  • There are many many traffic opportunities for Dev.to :)

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Thanks a lot!

Un-indexing the empty profiles had never occurred to me, but that makes sense. And I can look for other things along these lines.

The idea is that Google will penalize the whole domain as low value because these pages are not relevant search results?

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loukilaymen profile image
Aymen Loukil

Penalize is a big word here.. Google attribute to every website a quota named "crawl budget".

It is about the number of pages to crawl per a timeframe (a day for simplifying), so if you tire its bot crawling low value / light content pages, it will difficultly discover the pages that are good and leverage value to users..

Another angle : Every page that i push to Google should have a ranking goal..Is it unique ? does it contain valuable content ? Accessible by one unique URL ? It targets what keyword(s)..?

This could be a basic framework for deciding what type of pages should i index in my website.