Can Dramatically Increasing Site Size Have Negative Effects?
-
I have a site with about 1000 pages. I'm planning to add about 30,000 pages to it. Can increasing the footprint by such an amount all of a sudden have any negative consequences for existing organic or hoped-for benefits from new pages?
Would the site draw any increased scrutiny from Google for doing this?
Any other considerations?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Hi Robert,
Good point. From a time cost to search benefit point of view, the initial set up is the big cost... getting the template right.
After that, if you're creating 3000 or 30,000 pages is really no extra time... just flowing in the data. So, with that in mind, wouldn't the site be better off search wise-with 10x the pages (30k vs 3k) to monetize the set-up cost over?
Also, having cut the list down already based on non-search criteria, I have no reliable way of knowing which of the 30,000 is better than the next search-wise. They're all kinda medium nichey with low volume and about the same estimated difficulty. So, no idea which page would do better than the next in search.
Also, I can't look at 30,000 pages or even 3000 of search data to make that cut. Know what I mean? So, the cut, if there were one, would be random.
Thanks... Darcy
-
Here's a question I often ask of our team: What are we spending our time on in terms of time cost vs. benefit? So, if putting in the 30K product pages is taking x amount of time, have you asked yourself - Why? Just to get clicks on some you don't have? Etc. So, if you were to take say the best 3000 and put the reviews, other content, etc. and when that was done then start on the next 3000 in the same way, would your result be improved? Would gaining PA on the ones you had truly optimized get you high enough that you can get more traffic to the site? Do you then keep improving at a rate that is augmenting where you are going?
So, instead of asking is this a good idea (and on the face it is), ask is this the best idea?
Hope it helps
-
Hi Dana & BigFish22,
Both good points... thanks!
Here's a little more detail... the site has been about a certain product area for a long time. I'm adding catalog pages for 30,000 different products.
The pages are geared to searches around the word "buy" plus the product name. The pages are different from each other in that the product name, manufacturer, pictures, picture tagging, title & description tags all use different product names and other information. So, the pages are different from each other, but out of the gate not amazingly different from the basic info available on other sites that sell these products... all manufacturer data flowing into a template.
My plan is to put up the catalog and then over time add reviews and other content to make the pages really different from other site's catalog paes that draw on substantially the same basic information.
What do you think? Thanks! Best... Darcy
-
Darcy,
I think Dana makes the best point possible and that is...is the content GOOD? Is it something people are looking for? etc.
To just add content is not helpful in my opinion. But, we have sites that we add 100's of pages a month to and it is all unique content around specific verticals. It is amazing to watch what happens as you add better and better content and more of it to a site.Hope this helps. A question would be: Over what period and is the content already created?
-
Hi Darcy,
I don't think anyone here can give you a concrete answer to your question. If they do, be suspicious. If you add 30,000 pages of totally unique content....then I think you will skyrocket to the top of organic listings. If your content is substantially similar, or just copies of content from other places, then, it's not really going to help you at all. It might hurt you. It might not.
I;m not sure that's the answer you were looking for but I hope it's helpful!
Dana
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
-
Having problem with multiple ccTLD sites, SERP showing different sites on different region
Hi everyone, We have more than 20 websites for different region and all the sites have their specific ccTLD. The thing is we are having conflict in SERP for our English sites and almost all the English sites have the same content I would say 70% of the content is duplicating. Despite having a proper hreflang, I see co.uk results in (Google US) and not only .co.uk but also other sites are showing up (xyz.in, xyz.ie, xyz.com.au)The tags I'm using are below, if the site is for the US I'm using canonical and hreflang tag :https://www.xyz.us/" />https://www.xyz.us/" hreflang="en-us" />and for the UK siteshttps://www.xyz.co.uk/" />https://www.xyz.co.uk/" hreflang="en-gb" />I know we have ccTLD so we don't have to use hreflang but since we have duplicate content so just to be safe we added hreflang and what I have heard/read that there is no harm if you have hreflang (of course If implemented properly).Am I doing something wrong here? Or is it conflicting due to canonicals for the same content on different regions and we are confusing Google so (Google showing the most authoritative and relevant results)Really need help with this.Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shahryar890 -
Can a "site split" cause a drastic organic search decline?
Let's say you have a client. They have two big, main product offerings. Come early April of this year, one of the product offerings decide to move their product offering over to a new domain. Let's also say you had maybe 12 million links in your inbound link portfolio for the original domain. And when this product offering that split opened their new domain, they 301 redirected half of those 12 million links (maybe even 3/4s) over to their new domain. So you're left with "half" a website. And while you still have millions of links; you lost millions as well. Would a ~25-50% drop in organic traffic be a reasonable effect? My money is on YES. Because all links to a domain help "rise" the page authority sea level of all URLs of the domain. So cutting off 50-75% of those links would drop that sea level a somewhat corresponding amount. We did get some 301 redirects that we felt were "ours" in place in late July... but that really accounted for 25% of the total amount of pages with inbound links they took originally. And those got in place almost 4 months after the fact. Curious what other people may think. LnEazzi.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChristianMKG0 -
The review stars for my ecommerce site in the organic search disappeared, how can I have them shown again?
We run www.prams.net, an ecommerce store for strollers and other baby products out of the Uk. We always followed schema and the stars appeared in our product snippets in the organic search, helping us a lot. A couple of weeks ago the stars stopped appearing. When I do the site:www.prams.net they appear but not in the search results anymore. We have a french site as well. www.poussette.com, their it still works. Has anybody got tips what we can do to make the stars appear again? Thanks in advance. Dieter Lang
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0 -
Site dropped after recovery
Hi everybody! I've been working for http://www.newyoubootcamp.com for some time now. They came to me as they had dropped heavily for their main term, "boot camp". This turned out to be due to a manual penalty, which was in part due to their forum being hacked, as well as some bad link building. Here's an example of the dodgy forum links - http://about1.typepad.com/blog/2014/04/tweetdeck-to-launch-as-html5-web-app-now-accepting-beta-testers.html. The anchor is "microsoft". They've all been 410'd now. Also, we cleaned up the other bad links as best we could, and got through the manual penalty. The site then returned to #5 for "boot camps", below its pre-crash peak of #2, but OK. Over the past few weeks, it has started to slide though. I'm certain it is not down to a lack of quality links - this site has great PR and links from national newspapers and magazines. There's been a few on-site issues too, but nothing outrageous. I'm getting a bit stumped though, and any fresh eyes would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Google can't access/crawl my site!
Hi I'm dealing with this problem for a few days. In fact i didn't realize it was this serious until today when i saw most of my site "de-indexed" and losing most of the rankings. [URL Errors: 1st photo] 8/21/14 there were only 42 errors but in 8/22/14 this number went to 272 and it just keeps going up. The site i'm talking about is gazetaexpress.com (media news, custom cms) with lot's of pages. After i did some research i came to the conclusion that the problem is to the firewall, who might have blocked google bots from accessing the site. But the server administrator is saying that this isn't true and no google bots have been blocked. Also when i go to WMT, and try to Fetch as Google the site, this is what i get: [Fetch as Google: 2nd photo] From more than 60 tries, 2-3 times it showed Complete (and this only to homepage, never to articles). What can be the problem? Can i get Google to crawl properly my site and is there a chance that i will lose my previous rankings? Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | granitgash
Granit FvhvDVR.png dKx3m1O.png0 -
Any Effect From Little to no External Links?
The site I am working on has barely any links linking outwardly, being a fairly niche site it is hard to imagine many relevant places to link to. By not linking out, can this lead to problems in Google's eyes, I guess it would be good from the point of view of inward links & their dilution but is there anything related to looking strange on Google's link graph in this way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | motiv80 -
Potential problems with my site
Dear Mozzers I hope you can help me with the following problems: My site is up and running for a year now and may be there has been problem with the homepage, because it ranks on first page for a competitive keyword on Google.com and Google.com.au only, however in other countries it just shows up as internal page and does not rank well. google.com/Google.com.au: homepage ranks top 10 (example.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveTran2013
Other countries (.co.uk, .ca..ect) an internal page shows up, example.com/internalpage.html - shows on page 3-4. I can not find the homepage of example.com anywhere around top 1000. Can you please tell me what are the potential problems. Thank you very much. BR/Tran0 -
How can I penalise my own site in an international search?
Perhaps penalise isn't the right word, but we have two ecommerce sites. One at .com and one at .com.au. For the com.au site we would like only that site to appear for our brand name search in google.com.au. For the .com site we would like only that site to appear for our brand name search in google.com. I've targeted each site in the respective country in Google Webmaster Tools and published the Australian and English address on the respective site. What I'm concerned about is people on Google.com.au searching our brand and clicking through to the .com site. Is there anything I can do to lower the ranking of my .com site in Google.com.au?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Benj250