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
-
Wondering if creating 256 new pages would cause duplicate content issues
I just completed a long post that reviews 16 landing page tools. I want to add 256 new pages that compare each tool against each other. For example: Leadpages vs. Instapage Leadpages vs. Unbounce Instapage vs. Unbounce, etc Each page will have one product's information on the left and the other on the right. So each page will be a unique combination BUT the same product information will be found on several other pages (its other comparisons vs the other 15 tools). This is because the Leadpages comparison information (a table) will be the same no matter which tool it is being compared against. If my math is correct, this will create 256 new pages - one for each combination of the 16 tools against each other! My site now is new and only has 6 posts/pages if that matters. Want to make sure I don't create a problem early on...Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | martechwiz0 -
Why some websites can rank the keywords they don't have in the page?
Hello guys, Yesterday, I used SEMrush to search for the keyword "branding agency" to see the SERP. The Liquidagency ranks 5th on the first page. So I went to their homepage but saw no exact keywords "branding agency", even in the page source. Also, I didn't see "branding agency" as a top anchor text in the external links to the page (from the report of SEMrush). I am an SEO newbie, can someone explain this to me, please? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Raymondlee0 -
No designated 404 page, but any made-up URL path displays homepage Good / Bad?
I have a custom website where if you type in companyxyz.com/_any-made-up-url _it displays the homepage. So then you will see the homepage and in the URL bar the made up URL path remains visible "companyxyz.com/any-made-up-url" Is this good or bad or not an issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Someone asked me: What's the latest in SEO?
Hi, I'm wondering how others would respond to this question. "What's the latest in SEO?" Someone random asked me this on a plane that does not know much about digital marketing, but has someone else do for their business. I told them the google algortithm is constantly changing and it's always new, that there are about 500 changes a year (thought that was close to right) and then got down to some basic principals. I'm asking how you might answer as I could see someone asking me this within my organization as well. Thanks for any tips on a great answer or resources. Laura
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson321 -
B2B site targeting 20,000 companies with 20,000 dedicated "target company pages" on own website.
An energy company I'm working with has decided to target 20,000 odd companies on their own b2b website, by producing a new dedicated page per target company on their website - each page including unique copy and a sales proposition (20,000 odd new pages to optimize! Yikes!). I've never come across such an approach before... what might be the SEO pitfalls (other than that's a helluva number of pages to optimize!). Any thoughts would be very welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Keyword research when the site's subject is low volume
Hey guys, what do you do when you planning a new website and doing keyword research for a site when the avg. search volumes are relatively low. We set up run contact centres for UK charities including voice, webchat, sms, email and response fulfillment etc. It seems that people aren't really searching that often for this 'sexy subject'. Average volumes for searches with some intent/qualifier range from between 10-100 monthly searches. What sort of strategies would you adopt in this scenario? Do you optimise for what you can and then make a large focus on other digital marketing tactics such as content marketing, social media, email marketing etc. Thanks for your time guys Leo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Leo_Woodhead0 -
Javascript to fetch page title for every webpage, is it good?
We have a zend framework that is complex to program if you ask me, and since we have 20k+ pages that we need to get proper titles to and meta descriptions, i need to ask if we use Javascript to handle page titles (basically the previously programming team had NOT set page titles at all) and i need to get proper page titles from a h1 tag within the page. current course of action which we can easily implement is fetch page title from that h1 tag being used throughout all pages with the help of javascript, But this does makes it difficult for engines to actually read what's the page title? since its being fetched with javascript code that we have put in, though i had doubts, is anyone one of you have simiilar situation before? if yes i need some help! Update: I tried the JavaScript way and here is what it looks like http://islamicencyclopedia.org/public/index/hadith/id/1/book_id/106 i know the fact that google won't read JavaScript like the way we have done with the website, But i need help on "How we can work around this issue" Knowing we don't have other options.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SmartStartMediacom0 -
A Noob's SEO Plan of attack... can you critique it for me?
I've been digging my teeth into SEO for a solid 1.5 weeks or so now and I've learned a tremendous amount. However, I realize I have only scratched the surface still. One of the hardest things I've struggled with is the sheer amount of information and feeling overwhelmed. I finally think I've found a decent path. Please critique and offer input, it would be much appreciated. Step One: Site Architecture I run an online proofreading & editing service. That being said, there are lots of different segment we would eventually like to rank for other than the catch-all phrases like 'proofreading service'. For example, 'essay editing', 'resume editing', 'book editing', or even 'law school personal statement editing'. I feel that my first step is to understand how my site is built to handle this plan now, and into the future. Right now we simply have the homepage and one segment: kibin.com/essay-editing. Eventually, we will have a services page that serves almost like a site-map, showing all of our different services and linking to them. Step Two: Page Anatomy I know it is important to have a well defined anatomy to these services pages. For example, we've done a decent job with 'above the fold' content, but now understand the importance of putting the same type of care in below the fold. The plan here is to have a section for recent blog posts that pertain to that subject in a section titled "Essay Editing and Essay Writing Tips & Advice", or something to that effect. Also including some social sharing options, other resources, and an 'about us' section to assist with keyword optimization is in the plan. Step Three: Page Optimization Once we're done with Step Two, I feel that we'll finally be ready to truly optimize each of our pages. We've down some of this already, but probably less than 50%. You can see evidence of this on our essay editing page and proofreading rates page. So, the goal here is to find the most relevant keywords for each page and optimize for those to the point we have A grades on our on-page optimization reports. Step Four: Content/Passive Link Building The bones for our content strategy is in place. We have sharing links on blog posts already in place and a slight social media presence already. I admit, the blog needs some tightening up, and we can do a lot more on our social channels. However, I feel we need to start by creating content that our audience is interested in and interacting with them on a consistent basis. I do not feel like I should be chasing link building strategies or guest blog posts at this time. PLEASE correct me if I'm off base here, but only after reading step five: Step Five: Active Link Building My bias is to get some solid months of creating content and building a good social media presence where people are obviously interacting with our posts and sharing our content. My reasoning is that it will make it much easier for me to reach out to bloggers for guest posts as we'll be much more reputable after spending time doing step 4. Is this poor thinking? Should I try to get some guest blog posts in during step 4 instead? Step Six: Test, Measure, Refine I'll admit, I have yet to really dive into learning about the different ways to measure our SEO efforts. Besides being set up with our first campaign as an SEOPro Member and having 100 or so keywords and phrases we're tracking... I'm really not sure what else to do at this point. However, I feel we'll be able to measure the popularity of each blog post by number of comments, shares, new links, etc. once I reach step 6. Is there something vital I'm missing or have forgotten here? I'm sorry for the long winded post, but I'm trying to get my thoughts straight before we start cranking on this plan. Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TBiz2