More pages is good for SEO? Is this true?
-
Hi Guys
I have a question, I was told the more pages I have the better for SEO, Is this true?
-
All in all, more pages would definitely increase your website's authority and provide strong signal about it's topic. So yea, it would better for seo, but only if those pages are valuable to the users - coz creating pages just for the sakes of it, would mean spamming.
-
Hi Justin
I have only found more content to help SEO when that content was of high quality and was what the user needed.
In cases where lots of content has been used without thought of the user, but just going after keywords or locations, then in the long run it has had a negative SEO affect.
-
Good Morning Justin,
The question is rather subjective. In which there is not a clear answer I can give. Carlos is spot on when he says that simply having more pages but without relevant content is a waste.
However, having more quality pages is in fact good.
Let us try to look at 3 cases. Read each one and put in order which sites you would prefer to visit.
Rachel just moved to Worthington which has a very nice well maintained bike path. She is looking for information about the latest bicycles and is considering buying one, but wants to do some research to see if she can bike to work which is 5 miles away from her new home.
- Case 1: A Local bike shop website, worthingtonbycycles.com
This site has about 10 pages, it shows the biking paths, some hot spots, where drinking fountains are and list some of the models and brands they carry in store. - Case 2: A national ecommerce site, everthingbikesonline.com
This site has thousands of pages of products from bicycle tires to customized bicycle seat covers. It talks about different brands and does pricing comparisons. Promises fast shipping and customer service. - Case 3. A bicycle enthusiast site, welovebiking.com
This site also has thousands of pages and has real people talking about a specific brand durability, what modifications can be done, how often they ride and how far they go. If further details up coming trends and show cases break through technologies. It does bike comparisons not only for price but also for value.
Now pretend you're Google, you have only these 3 sites to show the Rachel. Based on what you know about Rachel which site would you return in the number 1, 2 and 3 position?
The answer depends on what exactly Rachel types into the search box. For most all searches I can imagine Rachel typing my answer would be 1, 3, 2. Or 3, 1, 2.
So in this study we find that the small local shop is probably going to out rank the national e commerce site for pretty much anything Rachel may search for. it has less pages but has enough quality to warrant showing it to Rachel. We also see the site by enthusiast is ranking very well it has lots of pages but it also has lots of quality content. The national site didn't rank as well because Rachel isn't concerned about seat covers and tire treed she wants to know about her local commute and what bicycles are best for the distance she has to travel.
If we were to take Rachel out of the picture and just compare the big ecommerce site vs the enthusiast site on a national scale then the enthusiast site wins in most cases where people are looking for information. The caveat is if somebody searches for something very specific like velvet bicycle seat covers model X320. In which case the e commerce site would be the top choice.
I hope that helps and makes sense,
Don
- Case 1: A Local bike shop website, worthingtonbycycles.com
-
Hi Justin,
If the pages are duplicated ones or don't have relevant content is a waste of google crawl budget.
One of the things I do always when I start an audit is check a crawl of the site with the access in analytics and the logs (access of the bots) to see the useful and useless pages for SEO.
With this data you can take better decisions.
Hope it helps
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
-
Robots.txt file in Shopify - Collection and Product Page Crawling Issue
Hi, I am working on one big eCommerce store which have more then 1000 Product. we just moved platform WP to Shopify getting noindex issue. when i check robots.txt i found below code which is very confusing for me. **I am not getting meaning of below tags.** Disallow: /collections/+ Disallow: /collections/%2B Disallow: /collections/%2b Disallow: /blogs/+ Disallow: /blogs/%2B Disallow: /blogs/%2b I can understand that my robots.txt disallows SEs to crawling and indexing my all product pages. ( collection/*+* ) Is this the query which is affecting the indexing product pages? Please explain me how this robots.txt work in shopify and once my page crawl and index by google.com then what is use of Disallow: Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
Can anyone suggest good keywords for this
hello everyone, can you please suggest Good Keywords for my client domain www.amojobs.com. Any one can help please ?? my client Need it urgent.. Thanx in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | poojathakar0 -
Are businesses still hiring SEO that use strategies that could lead to a Google penalty?
Is anyone worried that businesses know so little about SEO that they are continuing to hire SEO consultants that use strategies that could land the website with a Google penalty? I ask because we did some research with businesses and found the results worrying: blog farms, over optimised anchor text. We will be releasing the data later this week, but wondered if it something for the SEO community to worry about and what can be done about it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | williamgoodseoagency.com0 -
Footer images links, good or bad?
Hi everybody! I have a very serius question because i have a problem with this. We run a website of voucher codes and we are looking that our rivals are putting their logos on footers of online stores with images, sometimes link to home, sometimes link to store within webpage. Should i ask for the same to online stores? I have scary to get a penalty by Google. Please help me with this and recommend me something because we are doing fair play but rivals are doing this and they get best results in SERPS. Thanks very much! Best regards!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pompero990 -
Duplicate content for product pages
Say you have two separate pages, each featuring a different product. They have so many common features, that their content is virtually duplicated when you get to the bullets to break it all down. To avoid a penalty, is it advised to paraphrase? It seems to me it would benefit the user to see it all laid out the same, apples to apples. Thanks. I've considered combining the products on one page, but will be examining the data to see if there's a lost benefit to not having separate pages. Ditto for just not indexing the one that I suspect may not have much traction (requesting data to see).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SSFCU0 -
Does Backlinks from User Profile Page Still Matter
Though, lot of algorithmic changes, updates have happened. However, backlinks from quality source or trusted sites has hardly lost its importance and thats why Open SIte Explorer or Majestic seo is still there to find quality of backlinks, trust factor and authority factor of the backlinks. I need to know does having backlink (dofollow) from Profile Page - still matters and if yes - will a do follow backlink from Moz Profile Page or any authority site or forum page, having dofollow link from user profile page - does it still count as a mark to authority of your site.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Modi0 -
All pages going through 302 redirect - bad?
So, our web development company did something I don't agree with and I need a second opinion. Most of our pages are statically cached (the CMS creates .html files), which is required because of our traffic volume. To get geotargeting to work, they've set up every page to 302 redirect to a geodetection script, and back to the geotargeted version of the page. Eg: www.example.com/category 302 redirects to www.example.com/geodetect.hp?ip=ip_address. Then that page 302 redirects back to either www.example.com/category, or www.example.com/geo/category for the geo-targeted version. **So all of our pages - thousands - go through a double 302 redirect. It's fairly invisible to the user, and 302 is more appropriate than 301 in this case, but it really worries me. I've done lots of research and can't find anything specifically saying this is bad, but I can't imagine Google being happy with this. ** Thoughts? Is this bad for SEO? Is there a better way (keeping in mind all of our files are statically generated)? Is this perfectly fine?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dholowiski0 -
Question about local SEO when you serve many more cities than you have brick and mortar locations
My URL is: http://www.mollysmusic.org for the record.I run a music school that serves in-home lessons to a whole slew of cities. Since I only have 3 brick-and-mortar locations, I can't make google local profiles for all the cities served, but I want to get seen by those people searching in their own cities. Right now, our biggest competitor, takelessons.com, is top ranked for every single city you can think of, because they have individual web pages for every city served. Their content is repetitive and scrapey, and to me, that says "doorway page" which supposedly can get you de-indexed. I'm reluctant to do that because I'm afraid I'll get banned, but I have to compete. I also want a strategy that can scale when we move into new areas. Is there something that makes TakeLessons's content NOT a doorway page? What's the best practice for getting ranked in multiple individual cities if you run a service? Thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mollysmusic0