Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
-
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
-
Yes, always keep or redirect URLs. So often during a website redesign, web designers become lazy and create brand new child page URLs. When the site goes live, those URLs are 404 codes stranded on Google for a few weeks. Terrible practice.
As far as on page content, I am a fan of 300+ words as well. However, in a more competitive keyword, I would recommend 1,000+. The jury is still out as to how many pages to update per day. I would estimate 10 per week would be great...but build on the content...not necessarily replace.
-
It's a pleasure!
-
Hi Nigel,
Thank you for the response! yes I did mean URLs rather than Domains. That is exactly the feedback I was hoping to get and puts me more at ease when looking at the roll-out timeline for content updates.
Appreciate your help!
-
Hi Bankable
It used to be that whenever I touched a page there would be a fall. I'd messed with it and Google didn't like it! Now I find that any changes that add value rise in Google and quite quickly too! Pages that I edit are picked up very quickly, literally as often as Google passes by and re-indexes a page. You can get an idea of how frequently that is for these pages by searching for them then clicking on the green arrow right of the URL to see when they were last cached (See Image). Could be up to 4 weeks, but I find that the higher the page is up the hierarchy, the more frequently it gets crawled.
When you say Domains I think you mean URLs?
For on page content I would recommend you stick to 300 words+ and make sure that the content you are adding is focused around a single keyword or a small group of contextually similar keywords and short phrases. Don't splurge content between different pages - make sure the writing is focused.
I see little difference in changing 10 pages in one day or 10 pages over 10 days so go ahead and if you can improve on what's there quickly then do it.
Regards Nigel
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
-
Can subdomains hurt your primary domain's SEO?
Our primary website https://domain.com has a subdomain https://subDomain.domain.com and on that subdomain we have a jive-hosted community, with a few links to and fro. In GA they are set up as different properties but there are many SEO issues in the jive-hosted site, in which many different people can create content, delete content, comment, etc. There are issues related to how jive structures content, broken links, etc. My question is this: Aside from the SEO issues with the subdomain, can the performance of that subdomain negatively impact the SEO performance and rank of the primary domain? I've heard and read conflicting reports about this and it would be nice to hear from the MOZ community about options to resolve such issues if they exist. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BHeffernan1 -
SEO on dynamic website
Hi. I am hoping you can advise. I have a client in one of my training groups and their site is a golf booking engine where all pages are dynamically created based on parameters used in their website search. They want to know what is the best thing to do for SEO. They have some landing pages that Google can see but there is only a small bit of text at the top and the rest of the page is dynamically created. I have advised that they should create landing pages for each of their locations and clubs and use canonicals to handle what Google indexes.Is this the right advice or should they noindex? Thanks S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bedynamic0 -
What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity?
Hello everyone, Maybe it is a stupid question, but I ask to the experts... What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity from those noindexed pages? For example, let's say I have many pages that look similar to a "main" page which I solely want to appear on Google, so I want to noindex all pages with the exception of that "main" page... but, what if I also want to transfer any possible link equity present on the noindexed pages to the main page? The only solution I have thought is to add a canonical tag pointing to the main page on those noindexed pages... but will that work or cause wreak havoc in some way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau3 -
One of my Friend's website Domain Authority is Reducing? What could be the reason?
Hello Guys, One of my friend's website domain authority is decreasing since they have moved their domain from HTTP to https.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Max_
There is another problem that his blog is on subfolder with HTTP.
So, can you guys please tell me how to fix this issue and also it's losing some of the rankings like 2-5 positions down. Here is website URL: myfitfuel.in/
here is the blog URL: myfitfuel.in/mffblog/0 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Duplicate content on recruitment website
Hi everyone, It seems that Panda 4.2 has hit some industries more than others. I just started working on a website, that has no manual action, but the organic traffic has dropped massively in the last few months. Their external linking profile seems to be fine, but I suspect usability issues, especially the duplication may be the reason. The website is a recruitment website in a specific industry only. However, they posts jobs for their clients, that can be very similar, and in the same time they can have 20 jobs with the same title and very similar job descriptions. The website currently have over 200 pages with potential duplicate content. Additionally, these jobs get posted on job portals, with the same content (Happens automatically through a feed). The questions here are: How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down? Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling What can be done to resolve these issues? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
Will a disclaimer affect Crawling?
Hello everyone! My German users will have to get a disclaimer according to German laws, now my question is the following: Will a disclaimer affect crawling? What's the best practice to have regarding this? Should I have special care in this? What's the best disclaimer technique? A Plain HTML page? Something overlapping the site? Thank you all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NelsonF0 -
Will having image lightbox with content on a web page SEO friendly?
This website is done in CMS. Will having lightbox pop up with content be SEO friendly? If you go to the web page and click on the images at the bottom of the page. There are lightbox that will display information. Will these lightbox content information be crawl by Google? Will it be consider as content for the url http://jennlee.com/portfolio/bran.. Thanks, John
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VizionSEO990