Significantly reducing number of pages (and overall content) on new site - is it a bad idea?
-
Hi Mozzers - I am looking at new site (not launched yet) - it contains significantly fewer pages than the previous site - 35 pages rather than 107 before - content on the remaining pages is plentiful but I am worried about the sudden loss of a significant "chunk" of the website - significantly cutting the size of a website must surely increase the risks of post-migration performance problems?
Further info - the site has run an SEO contract with a large SEO firm for several years. They don't appear to have done anything beyond tinkering with homepage content - all the header and description tags are the same across the current website. 90% of site traffic currently arrives on the homepage. Content quality/volume isn't bad across most of the current site.
Thanks in advance for your input!
-
Hi Luke
I wouldn't say keyword density is totally irrelevant, but what I mean by that is that you would expect to see on any page the keywords related to the subject of that page. But attempting to add keywords to a page to increase density to make it more indexable is not what you should be doing.
The focus of a page for semantic search needs to be the subject as a whole so content should be written for the whole in much the same way as you would write offline and include related content where relevant.
I'm not sure if there really is a safe percentage as such for keyword density, but suffice to say that the higher the percentage the more likely a page will be seen as spammy. I would have thought in most cases though <3% should be fine.
Peter
-
Hi Peter - sorry yes not that clear! I was asking about Keyword density I suppose - I know many SEOers suggest it's irrelevant, yet I spend much of my time removing penalties from sites and Keyword stuffing is causing issues.
If I see a penalty which I think is stuffing related I check densities and drop to 3% maximum - that appears to have reversed penalty a couple of times.
-
Hi Luke
No problem. You asked: How do you manage onsite keywords in content these days?
I am not clear what you are asking. Please can you clarify?
Peter
-
Thanks Peter for you useful input, as ever. How do you manage onsite keywords in content these days?
It's incredible how often the 301 redirect thing is overlooked by developers managing migrations - oh the number of times I've been called in after the developer has 301'd everything to the homepage (or not even bothered doing any redirects).
-
Hi Luke
For sure, carving away 2/3rds of your previous site is a big chunk, but I don't think that should overly concern you.
If you had said you were thinking of doing this a couple of years ago, I would have encouraged you to think again on the basis that the more pages your site had, the more weight it had, the more pages could be optimised and the more entry points there were from search.
With changes in recent months to Google search, in particular the move to semantic search and away from Boolean search, then having a keyword rich site, with many well optimised correct keyword density pages, shouldn't be the focus any more.
I'm not suggesting that having 35 pages compared to 107 pages is better. What I am saying is that it is better to have 35 sharply focused, high quality pages than 107 pages that don't have the same definition and focus. The measure should most definitely be quality over quantity, both on a page count basis and even on a word count basis.
What I would focus on with your 35 pages is making sure they are well structured (so many on-page SEO rules still apply - so make sure the faulty parts you mentioned are fixed) and the navigation is clear.
I am sure you know this, but make sure that your pages are customer-focused, so that they answer the type of questions your customers are asking in the language of your customer, and where related questions could occur, make sure there are good internal links between related content pages.
Finally, when you do the switch, I would just make sure that you think about your 301 redirects. Where an old page no longer exists on the new site, then redirect it to the closest related page.
I hope that helps,
Peter
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
-
Schema markup concerning category pages on an ecommerce site
We are adding json+ld data to an ecommerce site and myself and one of the other people working on the site are having a minor disagreement on things. What it comes down to is how to mark up the category page. One of us says it needs to be marked up with as an Itempage, https://schema.org/ItemPage The other says it needs to be marked up as products, with multiple product instances in the schema, https://schema.org/Product The main sticking point on the Itemlist is that Itemlist is a child of intangible, so there is a feeling that should be used for things like track listings or other arbitrary data.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LesleyPaone2 -
Pages that did NOT 301 redirect to the new site
Hi, Is there a tool out there that can tell me what pages did NOT 301 redirect to the new sites? I need something rather than going into google.com and typing in site:oldsite.com to see if it's still indexed and if it's not 301 redirecting.. I'm not sure if screaming frog can do that. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Do I use H1 tag for logo or page content?
Should the h1 tag be used for the main page content or the logo? I understand the original method was too H1 the logo with the main search term, does this still hold true or should it be content focused?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Same content pages in different versions of Google - is it duplicate>
Here's my issue I have the same page twice for content but on different url for the country, for example: www.example.com/gb/page/ and www.example.com/us/page So one for USA and one for Great Britain. Or it could be a subdomain gb. or us. etc. Now is it duplicate content is US version indexes the page and UK indexes other page (same content different url), the UK search engine will only see the UK page and the US the us page, different urls but same content. Is this bad for the panda update? or does this get away with it? People suggest it is ok and good for localised search for an international website - im not so sure. Really appreciate advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
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 -
Adding a huge new product range to eCommerce site and worried about Duplicate Content
Hey all, We currently run a large eCommerce site that has around 5000 pages of content and ranks quite strongly for a lot of key search terms. We have just recently finalised a business agreement to incorporate a new product line that compliments our existing catalogue, but I am concerned about dumping this huge amount of content (that is sourced via an API) onto our site and the effect it might have dragging us down for our existing type of product. In regards to the best way to handle it, we are looking at a few ideas and wondered what SEOMoz thought was the best. Some approaches we are tossing around include: making each page point to the original API the data comes from as the canonical source (not ideal as I don't want to pass link juice from our site to theirs) adding "noindex" to all the new pages so Google simply ignores them and hoping we get side sales onto our existing product instead of trying to rank as the new range is highly competitive (again not ideal as we would like to get whatever organic traffic we can) manually rewriting each and every new product page's descriptions, tags etc. (a huge undertaking in terms of working hours given it will be around 4,400 new items added to our catalogue). Currently the industry standard seems to just be to pull the text from the API and leave it, but doing exact text searches shows that there are literally hundreds of other sites using the exact same duplicate content... I would like to persuade higher management to invest the time into rewriting each individual page but it would be a huge task and be difficult to maintain as changes continually happen. Sorry for the wordy post but this is a big decision that potentially has drastic effects on our business as the vast majority of it is conducted online. Thanks in advance for any helpful replies!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
How to remove bad link to your site?
Hello, Our website www.footballshirtblog.co.uk recently suffered a major Google penalty, wiping out 6 months of hard work. We went from getting 6000-10000 hits a day to absolutely nothing from Google. We have been baffled by the penalty as we couldn't think of anything we've done wrong. After some analysis of Open Site Explorer, it seems I may have found the answer. There is a ton of bad links pointing to us. A few example domains are: ru.gg/ gogopzh.com/ 0575bbs.com/ This is nothing to do with us and so I can only assume some competitor has done this. As we were only about 4-5 months old, I guess Google has punished us. What do we do now? This is not a situation I have experienced before and would really appreciate your expert advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840 -
What on-page/site optimization techniques can I utilize to improve this site (http://www.paradisus.com/)?
I use a Search Engine Spider Simulator to analyze the homepage and I think my client is using black hat tactics such as cloaking. Am I right? Any recommendations on to improve the top navigation under Resorts pull down. Each of the 6 resorts listed are all part of the Paradisus brand, but each resort has their own sub domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0