Creating 100,000's of pages, good or bad idea
-
Hi Folks,
Over the last 10 months we have focused on quality pages but have been frustrated with competition websites out ranking us because they have bigger sites. Should we focus on the long tail again?
One option for us is to take every town across the UK and create pages using our activities. e.g.
Stirling
Stirling paintball
Stirling Go Karting
Stirling Clay shootingWe are not going to link to these pages directly from our main menus but from the site map.
These pages would then show activities that were in a 50 mile radius of the towns. At the moment we have have focused our efforts on Regions, e.g. Paintball Scotland, Paintball Yorkshire focusing all the internal link juice to these regional pages, but we don't rank high for towns that the activity sites are close to.
With 45,000 towns and 250 activities we could create over a million pages which seems very excessive! Would creating 500,000 of these types of pages damage our site? This is my main worry, or would it make our site rank even higher for the tougher keywords and also get lots of traffic from the long tail like we used to get.
Is there a limit to how big a site should be?
-
Hi Mark!
Thanks for asking this good question. While there is no limit to how big a website can be, I think you can see from the general response here that most members would encourage you to stick to manually developing quality pages rather than automating hundreds of thousands of pages, solely for ranking purposes. I second this advice.
Now, I would like to clarify your business model. Are you a physical, actual business that customers come to, either to buy paintball equipment or to play paintball in a gallery? Or, is your business virtual, with no in person transactions? I'm not quite understanding this from your description.
If the former, I would certainly encourage you to develop a very strong, unique page for each of your physical locations. If you have 10 locations (with unique street addresses and phone numbers), then that would be 10 pages. If you've got 20 locations, that would be 20 pages, etc. But don't approach these with a 'just switch out the city name in the title tags' mindset. Make these pages as exceptional as possible. Tell stories, show off testimonials, share pictures and videos, entertain, educate, inspire. These city landing pages will be intimately linked into your whole Local SEM campaign, provided they each represent a business location with a unique dedicated street address and unique local area code phone number.
But, if you are considering simply building a page for every city in the UK, I just can't see justification for doing so. Ask yourself - what is the value?
There are business models (such as carpet cleaners, chimney sweeps, general contractors, etc.) that go to their clients' locations to serve and for which I would be advising that they create city landing pages for each of their service cities, but this would be extremely regional...not statewide or national or International. A carpet cleaner might serve 15 different towns and cities in his region, and I would encourage him to start gathering project notes and testimonials, videos and photos to begin developing a body of content important enough for him to start creating strong, interesting and unique pages for each of these cities. But I've also had local business owners tell me they want to cover every city in California, for instance, because they think it will help them to do so, and I discourage this.
Even if the business is virtual and doesn't have any in-person transactions with clients or physical locations, I would still discourage this blanketing-the-whole-nation-with-pages approach. A national retailer needs to build up its brand so that it becomes known and visible organically for its products rather than your theoretical approach of targeting every city in the nation. In short order, the mindset behind that approach just doesn't make good horse sense.
And, as others have stated, adding thousands of thin, potentially duplicate pages to any site could definitely have a very negative effect on rankings.
My advice is to make the time to start developing a content strategy for cities in which you have a legitimate presence. If budget means you can't hire a copywriter to help you with this and to speed up the work, accept that this project deserves all the time you can give it and that a slow development of exceptional pages is better than a fast automation of poor quality pages.
Hope this helps!
-
Hi Mark,
If A,C, and E's page is similar to B,D, and F's page it is still consider dupllicate content. Based on Webmaster's definiton:
"Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar"
Each of your pages should be unique and different from other pages.
I suggest you to continue providing quality content and target the long tail keywords. That alone will help you generate more traffic. Furthermore, out ranking is not a problem. You should focus on getting to the frist page (providing quality content with long tail or regular keywords) and when you are on the first page, try to get searchers to click on your link using Title tag and Meta descriptions.
Out ranking just means they are ranked 4th and you are ranked 5th, 6th but as long as you have a better title tag and meta description. I believe searchers will click on the more attractive results.
-
Cookie cutter pages like these stopped working in Google about ten years ago.
If you toss them up I think that your entire site will tank.
I would go back to focusing on quality pages.
-
If the user experience awesome, and people are staying on your site and looking around, great. If you think the 100,000 pages will make search engines love you, machines can never provide the love users can give you.
-
Can you mix content up from your website e.g. paintball site A, C and E on one page and B,D and F on another if the towns are close together? What I'm not sure about is how different in % terms the content actually has to be.
If we have less written content then the amounts of words we have to actually change would be much less.
The challenge we have is we have build the site this time with filtering in mind, so rather than making customers navigate we allow them to be able to search which is much better in terms of getting the activities they want. The downside is now our site does not show for the long tail as we reduced the pages massively.
-
so we dont have the resources if we did it manually but what would happen is the content would be different on each page as we would only show activity sites within a 50 miles radius. And we would make certain text, h1 etc different and relate to the town.
Below are some examples of sites I see doing well ie number 1 using this method
Our content would be much better than say http://www.justpaintballDOTcoDOTuk/site_guide/Aberfeldy.htm or http://www.goballisticDOTcoDOTuk/paintball_in_/ABERFELDY.asp
But as you say getting this wrong is my worry.
-
Hi Mark,
Creating 100,000 pages is definitely good for Search Engine because you have a lot more contents for them to crawl and have more chances your pages might show up on related keywords. However, the problem is do you have enough unique contents you can post on all those 100,000 pages. If you use similar content, I am afraid it will be duplicate contents. You may think changing up the town names will be enough but it might be risky.
If you can create 100,000 unique contents, Sure go ahead. If not, don't take the risk of duplicate contents.
-
Do you have the resources to create unique content for all those pages? Because adding 500,000 pages of duplicate content will absolutely damage your site.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to get a large number of urls out of Google's Index when there are no pages to noindex tag?
Hi, I'm working with a site that has created a large group of urls (150,000) that have crept into Google's index. If these urls actually existed as pages, which they don't, I'd just noindex tag them and over time the number would drift down. The thing is, they created them through a complicated internal linking arrangement that adds affiliate code to the links and forwards them to the affiliate. GoogleBot would crawl a link that looks like it's to the client's same domain and wind up on Amazon or somewhere else with some affiiiate code. GoogleBot would then grab the original link on the clients domain and index it... even though the page served is on Amazon or somewhere else. Ergo, I don't have a page to noindex tag. I have to get this 150K block of cruft out of Google's index, but without actual pages to noindex tag, it's a bit of a puzzler. Any ideas? Thanks! Best... Michael P.S., All 150K urls seem to share the same url pattern... exmpledomain.com/item/... so /item/ is common to all of them, if that helps.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
What's wrong with the algorithm?
Is it possible that Google is penalising a specific page and in the same time it shows unrelated page in the search results? "rent luxury car florence" shows https://lurento.com/city/munich/on the 2nd page (that's Munich, Germany) and in the same time completely ignores the related page https://lurento.com/city/florence/ How I can figure out if the specific page has been trashed and why? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lurento.com
Mike0 -
404's after pruning old posts
Hey all, So after reading about the benefits of pruning old content I decided to give it a try on our blog. After reviewing thousands of posts I found around 2500 that were simply not getting any traffic, or if they were there was 100% bounce & exit. Many of these posts also had content with relevance that had long ago expired. After deleted these old posts, I am now seeing the posts being reported as 404's in Google Search Console. But most of them are the old url with "trashed" appended to the url. My question is: are these 404's normal? Do I now have to go through and set up 301's for all of these? Is it enough to simply add the lot to my robots.txt file? Are these 404's going to hurt my blog? Thanks, Roman
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dynata_panel_marketing0 -
What is happening with this page's rankings? (G Analytics screenprint attached) help me.
Hi, At the moment im confused. I have a page which shows up for the query 'bank holidays' first page solid for 2 years - this also applies to the terms 'mothers day', 'pancake day' and a few others (UK Google). And there still ranking. Here is the problem: Usually I would rank for 'bank holidays 2014' (the terms with the year in are the real traffic drivers) and would be position 3/5. Over the last 3 months this has decayed dropping position to 30+. From the screenprint you can see the term 'Bank Holidays' is holding on but the term 'bank holidays 2014' is slowly decaying. If you query 'bank holidays 2015' we don't appear in rankings at all. What is causing this? The content is ok, social sharing happens and the odd link is picked up hear and there. I need help, how do I start pushing this back in the other direction, its like the site is slowly dying. And what really kills me, is 2 pages are ranking on page1 off link farms. URL: followuk.co.uk/bank-holidays serp-decay.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | followuk0 -
How do I tell if competitor's links are good?
One strategy I have seen recommended over and over is to look at your competitor's back links and see if any could be relevant for your site and worth pursuing. My question is how do I evaluate a link and not end up pursuing some penalized site? I would guess checking for Google index is a good idea since some of the webmasters may not be aware they are penalized. Is it DA and whether they are indexed alone? Many sites I have seen have DA in the teens but are legitimate in our industry. Should they not be considered due to low DA? Also I see links from directories on many competitor sites. Seems a controversial subject, but assuming the directory is industry specific, is it OK? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris6610 -
How do I prevent 404's from hurting my site?
I manage a real estate broker's site on which the individual MLS listing pages continually create 404 pages as properties are sold. So, on a site with 2200 pages indexed, roughly half are 404s at any given time. What can I do to mitigate any potential harm from this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Interesting 302 redirect situation - could they be a good idea??
Just started with a new SEO client. The site is built on Sharepoint Server 2007 running Windows Server 2003 R2 on IIS 6.5 (I know, fun times for me). Being a standard crappy Windows setup, URLs and canonicalization is a huge issue: first and foremost, we get a 302 redirect from the root www.example.com to www.example.com/Pages/default.aspx Now standard SEO best practices dictate that we rewrite and redirect these pages so they're clean URLs. However that may or may not be possible in the current environment - so is the next best thing to change those to 301s so at least link authority is passed better between pages? Here's the tricky thing - the 302s seem to be preventing Google from indexing the /Pages/default.aspx part of the URL, but the primary URL is being indexed, with the page content accurately cached, etc. So, www.example.com 302 redirects to www.example.com/Pages/default.aspx but the indexed page in Google is www.example.com www.example.com/sample-page/ 302 redirects www.example.com/sample-page/Pages/default.aspx but the indexed page in Google is www.example.com/sample-page/ I know Matt Cutts has said that in this case Google will most likely index the shorter version of the URL, so I could leave it, but I just want to make sure that link authority is being appropriately consolidated. Perhaps a rel=canonical on each page of the source URL? i.e. the www.example.com/sample-page/ - however is rel=canonical to a 302 really acceptable? Same goes for sitemaps? I know they always say end-state URLs only, but as the source URLs are being indexed, I don't really want Google getting all the /Pages/default.aspx crap. Looking for thoughts/ideas/experiences in similar situations?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OddDog0 -
In order to improve SEO with silos'urls, should i move my posts from blog directory to pages'directories ?
Now, my website is like this: myurl.com/blog/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html So I use silos urls. I'd like to improve my ranking a little bit more. Is it better to change my urls like this: myurl.com/category1/blog/mypost.html or maybe myurl.com/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Max840