If your website relies on user-generated content (UGC) as your primary content source, then this SEO guides is for you. UGC can be the growth engine for your website traffic, but it can also become the reason for missing traffic opportunities. First thing first, search engines like Google treat UGC like any other content published on your website. For search engines like Google, the fact that these contents published on your site means that your website owns the content.

Problem with UGC

The main challenge for most UGC websites is the lack of control over the quality of the content published by their users. Many UGC websites are suffering from thin, low quality, and duplicated contents. From our research, these UGC websites are also suffering non-structured contents that are missing important elements.

Take a look at Kaskus.co.id, the biggest online community forum in Indonesia. For the last few years, they are losing a massive amount of traffic. Other than the shift in the user's behavior and interest, the website is suffering from the problems mentioned above.

Kaskus Estimated Traffic Trend (SEMRUSH)

Kaskus has 19.1 million pages indexed on Google. However, looking deeper into these pages, many have very thin content, especially on thread reply content.

How can UGC become the growth engine for your website traffic?

Content Quality

Make sure that contents published by your users have value for the website audiences. To do this, you need to create content publishing guidelines that can be followed by your users—highlighting important rules for the UGC, from the length of the contents to what is inside the content itself.

Moderating UGC can also help to eliminate poor quality content. Kompasiana and Kumparan rely on their moderator to filter out content that doesn't meet their quality requirements. If you're heavily moderating the UGC, however, your website might never take off. Most UGC websites increase the moderation slowly as their user base grows.

Content Structure

Provide an easy way for users to help you improve the content structure. Here are some examples of how to do this:

Limit the content title length to match the maximum meta title information length needed by the search engines.
Provide a required excerpt field for the UGC; this can then used as a meta description for the content. Even though search engines can automatically extract meta descriptions from the content, most of the time, the results are not as good as we wanted.
Require an image title when an image uploaded to the content. We can use this image title as image alt text and file name.

Crawl-Budget Management

Crawl budget is an important area for the UGC website to optimize for search. And it will become more important as the users, and the number of contents that are published grows. It is important because you want Google to discover as many of your site's important pages as possible. You also want it to find new content on your site quickly. The bigger your crawl budget (and the smarter your management of it), the faster this will happen.

Here are the key areas where the UGC website needs to optimize for better crawl-ability:

Make sure that your XML sitemap is updated and clean.
Make sure that you only allow search engines to index pages that will help you win on search. Exclude contents that are not valuable for your audiences, ie comments, reply, tag, etc.
Take care of your page's canonicalisation. Make sure that your pages have an appropriate canonical tag, i.e. on your paginated contents.

Conclusion

Websites that rely on UGC have a better chance to win more search audiences with its wide content coverage. However, it is important to manage how the UGC is managed within the website.

SEO Guides For User Generated Content