E-commerce sites are particularly at risk here because they contain thousands of product pages that could use manufacturer product descriptions or generic placeholders. Canonical tags for duplicate pages and your own copy are the cure. - Too Much UGC Will Attract Panda User-generated content was the holy grail. It's social proof, it's free content, and it's proof of deep engagement. People don't contribute content to websites they don't care about. Post Panda, that started to change. And now SEOs are recommending that clients remove all user-generated content from their websites. Again, this is an overreaction based on a misunderstanding of what Panda is.
It's not about user generation, old, thin, whatever. It's a matter of quality. Some UGC are very high quality, while others tell you hair masking service that you won't believe how they made money online with this simple trick. Too much of this second type can actually work against you, as Google's John Mueller explains: Advertising Continue reading below “Another thing… that is common with forums is poor quality user-generated content. If you have ways to recognize this type of content and prevent it from getting indexed, it can be much easier for algorithms to assess the overall quality of your website.
The alleged UGC price is even worse if your site is or acts as a forum. In cases like Stack Overflow and Quora where almost all content is user-generated, what is the risk of Google tracking UGC spam? This same thing happened to Mozilla in 2013. Mueller recommends cleaning the house before getting hit with a penalty: “The same methods can be used to prevent forum spam from being indexed for your forum. Depending on the forum, there may be different ways to recognize this automatically, but it's usually worth finding automated ways to help you keep things clean and high quality, especially when a site consists mostly of content generated by users.