Do sites with a small number of content pages get penalized by Google?
-
If my site has just five content pages, instead of 25 or 50, then will it get penalized by Google for a given moderately competitive keyword?
-
Hi JoelHit, Thanks for answering my question comprehensively. If you have some time, then I have the last question for the month: http://www.seomoz.org/q/ideal-number-of-anchor-text-keyword-variations Thanks again!
-
You will never get penalized for not having something to say. YOu can have a one page website with non original content and the same title tag (ok, a two page site to get the same title thingy) and no meta description and you still won't get a red card. You are not original but that dosen't mean they will send you to the penalty box.
Penalisation is usually assigned to spam tehnicques (and usually that is the other side of a small website - you will get penalized if you have a lot of content and pages and you are using this in a malicious kind of way).
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
-
Will google be able to crawl all of the pages given that the pages displayed or the info on a page varies according to the city of a user?
So the website I am working for asks for a location before displaying the product pages. There are two cities with multiple warehouses. Based on the users' location, the product pages available in the warehouse serving only in that area are shown. If the user skips location, default warehouse-related product pages are shown. The APIs are all location-based.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Airlift0 -
Google cache is showing my UK homepage site instead of the US homepage and ranking the UK site in US
Hi There, When I check the cache of the US website (www.us.allsaints.com) Google returns the UK website. This is also reflected in the US Google Search Results when the UK site ranks for our brand name instead of the US site. The homepage has hreflang tags only on the homepage and the domains have been pointed correctly to the right territories via Google Webmaster Console.This has happened before in 26th July 2015 and was wondering if any had any idea why this is happening or if any one has experienced the same issueFDGjldR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adzhass0 -
Google indexing pages from chrome history ?
We have pages that are not linked from site yet they are indexed in Google. It could be possible if Google got these pages from browser. Does Google takes data from chrome?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
A/B Testing - Should I add product descriptions on my category landing pages as well as on product pages and if so . how to do this to avoid duplicate content
Hi All, I recently relaunched a new design on my tool hire eCommerce website and now display my products in grid form on my category landing pages as opposed to just a list view which we previously had on the old design. My bounce rates are alot higher than they use to be and my gut instinct is telling me maybe this is wrong . I want to do some a/b testing using a list view. My question is , previously in our list views we just showed the images and pricing and had on page content on the bottom of the page. The user would click on the product image and they would then we taken to the product page which has the product description , t&c, etc etc.. If I was to do this in my a/b testing but change it so we also displayed the product descriptions as well on the category landing pages . Is there a special way to do this as in effect, we would have duplicate content as the product descriptions are also on the product page?. Does anyone have any thoughts on this as to whether its a No No from an SEO point of view ?... Heres a short url link to one of my category pages - http://goo.gl/QJv5gw Historically we use to rank well for the category landing pages and not for the product pages.Our Rankings are down , bounce rates are higher so I am trying to sort both. We have good content on pages etc. Any advice greatly appreciated as always thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
SEO on page content links help
I run a website at the bottom we have scroller box which the old SEO guy used to contain all of the crap content so we can rank for keywords not on the page and put all of the links in to spread the link juice into the other inner category pages (some of these pages are only listed on our innerpages otherwise). We are trying to remove this content and add decent content above the fold with relevant long tail keywords in (it is currently decent but could do with expanding if we are removing this large chunk of text in theSEO box and some long tail keywords will be missing if we just remove it) we can add a couple of links into this new content but will struggle to list the category pages not on the left hand navigation. If we were to list all of the pages in the left hand nav would we dilute the power going to the main pages currently or would we be in the same position we are now? For example at the minute I would say the power is mainly going to the left hand nav links and then a small amount of power to the links in the SEO content if we put these into the nav will it not dilute the power to the main pages. Thank you for your time and hopefully your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Handling Similar page content on directory site
Hi All, SEOMOZ is telling me I have a lot of duplicate content on my site. The pages are not duplicate, but very similar, because the site is a directory website with a page for cities in multiple states in the US. I do not want these pages being indexed and was wanting to know the best way to go about this. I was thinking I could do a rel ="nofollow" on all the links to those pages, but not sure if that is the correct way to do this. Since the folders are deep within the site and not under one main folder, it would mean I would have to do a disallow for many folders if I did this through Robots.txt. The other thing I am thinking of is doing a meta noindex, follow, but I would have to get my programmer to add a meta tag just for this section of the site. Any thoughts on the best way to achieve this so I can eliminate these dup pages from my SEO report and from the search engine index? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cchhita0 -
Removing Duplicate Page Content
Since joining SEOMOZ four weeks ago I've been busy tweaking our site, a magento eCommerce store, and have successfully removed a significant portion of the errors. Now I need to remove/hide duplicate pages from the search engines and I'm wondering what is the best way to attack this? Can I solve this in one central location, or do I need to do something in the Google & Bing webmaster tools? Here is a list of duplicate content http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&mode=grid&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&mode=list&order=name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveMaguire
http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&mode=grid&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&mode=list&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?mode=grid http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?mode=list Thanks in advance, Steve0 -
Working out exactly how Google is crawling my site if I have loooots of pages
I am trying to work out exactly how Google is crawling my site including entry points and its path from there. The site has millions of pages and hundreds of thousands indexed. I have simple log files with a time stamp and URL that google bot was on. Unfortunately there are hundreds of thousands of entries even for one day and as it is a massive site I am finding it hard to work out the spiders paths. Is there any way using the log files and excel or other tools to work this out simply? Also I was expecting the bot to almost instantaneously go through each level eg. main page--> category page ---> subcategory page (expecting same time stamp) but this does not appear to be the case. Does the bot follow a path right through to the deepest level it can/allowed to for that crawl and then returns to the higher level category pages at a later time? Any help would be appreciated Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soeren.hofmayer0