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
-
Could another site copying my content hurt my ranking?
Earlier this week I asked why a page of mine might not be ranking locally. (https://moz.com/community/q/what-could-be-stopping-us-from-ranking-locally). Maybe this might be part of the answer – another firm has copied huge chunks of my website copy: **My company: **https://idearocketanimation.com/video-production-company/ The other company: http://studio3dm.com/studio3dm-com/video/ Could this be causing my page to not rank? And is there anything I can do about it, other than huff and puff to the other firm? (Which I am already doing.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wagster0 -
Taken a canonical off a page to let it rank with new unique content - what more can I do?
A week ago, I took a canonical off of a page that was pointing to the homepage for a very big, generic search term for my brand as we felt that it could have been harming our rankings (as it wasn't a true canonical page). A week in and our rankings for the term have dropped 7 positions out of page 1 and the page we want to rank instead is nowhere to be seen. Do I hang fire? As such a big search term, it's affecting traffic, but I don't want to make any rash decisions. Here's a bit more info: For arguments sake, let's call the search term we're going after 'Boots', with the URL where the canonical was placed of /boots. The canonical went to the root domain as we sell, well... boots. At the time, the homepage was ranking for Boots on page 1 and we wanted to change this so that the Boots page ranked for that term... all logical right? We did the following: Took off mentions of Boots from meta on the homepage and made sure it was optimised for on the boots page. Took the canonical off of /boots. Used GSC to fetch & ask Google to recrawl "/boots". Resubmitted the sitemap. Do I hang fire on running back to the safety of ranking for boots on the homepage? Do I risk keyword cannibalisation by adding the search terms back to the homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kelly_Edwards0 -
After adding a ssl certificate to my site I encountered problems with duplicate pages and page titles
Hey everyone! After adding a ssl certificate to my site it seems that every page on my site has duplicated it's self. I think that is because it has combined the www.domainname.com and domainname.com. I would really hate to add a rel canonical to every page to solve this issue. I am sure there is another way but I am not sure how to do it. Has anyone else ran into this problem and if so how did you solve it? Thanks and any and all ideas are very appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LovingatYourBest0 -
Duplicate content on sites from different countries
Hi, we have a client who currently has a lot of duplicate content with their UK and US website. Both websites are geographically targeted (via google webmaster tools) to their specific location and have the appropriate local domain extension. Is having duplicate content a major issue, since they are in two different countries and geographic regions of the world? Any statement from Google about this? Regards, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
Duplicate Content Warning For Pages That Do Not Exist
Hi Guys I am hoping someone can help me out here. I have had a new site built with a unique theme and using wordpress as the CMS. Everything was going fine but after checking webmaster tools today I noticed something that I just cannot get my head around. Basically I am getting warnings of Duplicate page warnings on a couple of things. 1 of which i think i can understand but do not know how to get the warning to go. Firstly I get this warning of duplicate meta desciption url 1: / url 2: /about/who-we-are I understand this as the who-we-are page is set as the homepage through the wordpress reading settings. But is there a way to make the dup meta description warning disappear The second one I am getting is the following: /services/57/ /services/ Both urls lead to the same place although I have never created the services/57/ page the services/57/ page does not show on the xml sitemap but Google obviously see it because it is a warning in webmaster tools. If I press edit on services/57/ page it just goes to edit the /services/ page/ is there a way I can remove the /57/ page safely or a method to ensure Google at least does not see this. Probably a silly question but I cannot find a real comprehensive answer to sorting this. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | southcoasthost0 -
Good idea to point all registered domains to main site?
We have close to 60 domains that we are considering pointing to our main site. Is this type of a redirect a good idea? We have a number of domains that are industry related but do not have our brand name in the domain. Should we point these sites to our homepage as well? Pros/Cons? Examples: <colgroup><col width="201"></colgroup> XXXXX.BE XXXXX.BIZ XXXXX.BZ XXXXX.CC XXXXX.CO XXXXX.CO.UK XXXXX.COM XXXXX.INFO XXXXX.JOBS XXXXX.ME XXXXX.ME.UK XXXXX.MOBI XXXXX.MX XXXXX.NET.CN XXXXX.NL XXXXX.ORG.UK XXXXX.TW XXXXX.US XXXXX.WS XXXXXEXCHANGE.COM XXXXXONLINE.COM WIDGETSRUS.COM WIDGETBLOG.COM |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaHoku0 -
How long for new pages to rank
Hi Guys, Our website has some really good serps for our established keyword phrases some of which are quite competitive. We recently acquired and have begun selling some new brands through our online shop and launched new pages for these brands around 2 months ago. They are quite competitive ("merrell shoes" and "timberland boots" for example in google.co.uk) terms. Do you think we should get some keyword rich links built into these new pages from external sites such as blogs - or is there chances of ranking well driven more off our overall site authority/link profile? In other peoples experience, what is a typical realistic timeframe to start getting meaningful serps on new pages/keyword phrases (I know that is hard to answer - but ball parks figures appreciated). Thank you everyone in advance. Kind Regards (and happy thanksgiving to our US friends)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ConradC
Conrad Cranfield0 -
Avoiding duplicate content on an ecommerce site
Hi all, I have an ecommerce site which has a standard block of text on 98% of the product pages. The site also has a blog. Because these cause duplicate content and duplicate title issues respectively, how can I ever get around this? Would having the standard text on the product pages displayed as an image help? And how can I stop the blog being listed as duplicate titles without a nofollow? We already have the canonical attribute applied to some areas where this is appropriate e.g. blog and product categories. Thanks for your help 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CMoore850