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
-
A client rebranded a few years ago and doesn't want to be associated with it's old brand name. He wishes not to appear when the old brand is searched in Google, is there something we can do?
The problem is there was redirection between the old branded site and the new one, and now when you type in the name of the old brand, the new one comes up. I have desperately tried to convince this client there is nothing we can do about it, dozens of news articles crop up with the two brands together as this was a hot topic a few years ago, but just in case I missed something I thought I'd ask the community of experts here on Moz. An example for this would be Tyco Healthcare that became covidien in 2007. When you type tyco healthcare, covidien crops up here and there. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netsociety0 -
Is it a problem that Google's index shows paginated page urls, even with canonical tags in place?
Since Google shows more pages indexed than makes sense, I used Google's API and some other means to get everything Google has in its index for a site I'm working on. The results bring up a couple of oddities. It shows a lot of urls to the same page, but with different tracking code.The url with tracking code always follows a question mark and could look like: http://www.MozExampleURL.com?tracking-example http://www.MozExampleURL.com?another-tracking-examle http://www.MozExampleURL.com?tracking-example-3 etc So, the only thing that distinguishes one url from the next is a tracking url. On these pages, canonical tags are in place as: <link rel="canonical<a class="attribute-value">l</a>" href="http://www.MozExampleURL.com" /> So, why does the index have urls that are only different in terms of tracking urls? I would think it would ignore everything, starting with the question mark. The index also shows paginated pages. I would think it should show the one canonical url and leave it at that. Is this a problem about which something should be done? Best... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Do Q&A 's work for SEO
If I create a good community in my particular field on my SEO site and have a quality Q&A section like this etc (ripping of MOZ's idea here sorry, I hope it's ok) will the long term returns be worth the effort of creating and man ageing this. Is the user created content of as much use as I think it will be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird0 -
SEO for 1,000,000 page site
Dear All, I hope you can help me with another question about doing SEO for a large site: 1 - My domain is 11 year old, all time was a parking domain
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveTran2013
2 - We have 10,000 articles - unique content (500-1500 words)
3 - the remaining are automated content, however, they are also unique with data (numbers, figure) We are going to launch it in 2 weeks, and intend to do the following things: Stage 1: first 2 months - only post 10,000 articles with unique content, NO using automated ones.
Link building: get 5-10 authority links pointing to it, either article writings or link pages (authority links Yahoo directory/Dmoz) Stage 2: month 3 to 6: gradually put the automated content online while still posting unique and well written articles.
Link building: Start building links with PR websites, article submission. Do you think there are any problems with this plan? and if 5-10 links can improve our site ranking, given it has a lot of unique content? Thank you very much. BR/Tran1 -
Is it a bad idea to have a "press" page and link to press mentions of our company?
We've recently been getting quite a bit of press. Would it be wise to create a "press" page and link to mentions of us or would this devalue the links on the press pages as Google may think they reciprocal?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JenniferDacosta0 -
What's your Link Building Tactics?
So my question is: What's your Link Building Tactic. I always have a bit of a problem building links for my websites. Also Do you use some kind of a tool? If yes can you reccomend it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
I'm afraid I may have messed up my site's organization
So I recently started working on an existing site for a company, and I'm afraid I may have done something to lose some backlinks. So to start off, say the website is www.domain.net and when I arrived domain.net and www.domain.net showed up as two separate sites so I changed my web.config file to direct all domain.net to www.domain.net The homepage was called default.asp, and I wanted the homepage to always show up as www.domain.net instead of www.domain.net/default.asp. Of course they both showed the same thing but I couldn't figure it out. So I removed www.domain.net/default.asp from indexing and changed the my internal links to the homepage to point at www.domain.net instead of simply pointing at the file default.asp. So now www.domain.net/default.asp still brings up the page, but I want it to revert to www.domain.net. I'm also a little worried because I noticed that one of my incoming links points at www.domain.net/default.asp and it doesn't get passed along to www.domain.net and I think i may have damaged my sites SEO I guess this is a very complicated and roundabout way of saying this, but how can I get www.domain.net/default.asp to take you to www.domain.net
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bcrabill0 -
Which is more effective: JQuery + CSS for Tabbed Content or Create Unique Pages for each tab.
We are building a from-scratch directory site and trying to determine the best way to structure our pages. Each general listing page has four sections of specific information. What is a better strategy for SEO: Using tabs (e.g. JQuery + CSS) and putting all content on one page (and will all of the content still be indexible using JQuery?) OR creating unique pages for each section. JQuery: sitename.com/listing-name#section1 Unique Pages: sitename.com/listing-name/section1 If I go with option one, I can risk not being crawlable by google if they can't read through the scripting. However, I feel like the individual pages will not rank if there's a small amount of content for each section. Is it better to keep all the content on one page and focus on building links to that? Or better to build out the section pages and worry about adding quality content to them so that long term there is more specificity for long tail search and better quality search experience on Google? We are also set up to have "../listing-type/listing-name" but are considering removing 'listing type and just having "../listing-name/". Do you think this more advantageous for boosting rankings? I know that was like five questions. I've been doing a lot of research and these are the things that I'm still scratching my head about. Some general direction would be really great! Thank You!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knowyourbank0