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
-
How long will old pages stay in Google's cache index. We have a new site that is two months old but we are seeing old pages even though we used 301 redirects.
Two months ago we launched a new website (same domain) and implemented 301 re-directs for all of the pages. Two months later we are still seeing old pages in Google's cache index. So how long should I tell the client this should take for them all to be removed in search?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Liamis0 -
Need Magento SEO expert for 301 clean up - any reco's?
My site is a total mess from a clean “crawling” perspective. We are still getting traffic and doing business, but I am afraid from an SEO perspective we are driving with the parking brake on. There a lot of 301’s and some of them are causing 404 errors. Below is an overview of my 5 year old magento site which was moved from a 5 year old xcart site (so there is a lot of old junk (url’s) in there). It needs cleaning up and I need a plan and seo / 301 help. Overview: Recently moved from http to https - not sure best practices were followed, but we had lots of crawl issues before this move. Analytics Top 100 Landing Pages = 82.7% of entrances Webmaster Tools 594 Pages Indexed 65 Not found errors - most involve 301’s - examples below Sitemap: 773 Submitted, 395 Indexed URL Parameters - 41 - I can’t tell if they are doing anything (helping or hurting) Moz Crawl Total Pages 3,454 324 Redirect Issues (258 Temp and 66 Chain) Magento 11,773 Redirects 5390 System 6383 Custom On July 15, 2017 I deleted 40 redirects from htaccess that a developer had put there that were causing problems. Blog We have a wordpress blog installed on Magento site. Years ago it was moved from a subdomain to a subdirectory.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SammyT0 -
Magento: Should we disable old URL's or delete the page altogether
Our developer tells us that we have a lot of 404 pages that are being included in our sitemap and the reason for this is because we have put 301 redirects on the old pages to new pages. We're using Magento and our current process is to simply disable, which then makes it a a 404. We then redirect this page using a 301 redirect to a new relevant page. The reason for redirecting these pages is because the old pages are still being indexed in Google. I understand 404 pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but was wondering if we were somehow preventing them dropping out of the index by redirecting the URL's, causing the 404 pages to be added to the sitemap. My questions are: 1. Could we simply delete the entire unwanted page, so that it returns a 404 and drops out of Google's index altogether? 2. Because the 404 pages are in the sitemap, does this mean they will continue to be indexed by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
When Mobile and Desktop sites have the same page URLs, how should I handle the 'View Desktop Site' link on a mobile site to ensure a smooth crawl?
We're about to roll out a mobile site. The mobile and desktop URLs are the same. User Agent determines whether you see the desktop or mobile version of the site. At the bottom of the page is a 'View Desktop Site' link that will present the desktop version of the site to mobile user agents when clicked. I'm concerned that when the mobile crawler crawls our site it will crawl both our entire mobile site, then click 'View Desktop Site' and crawl our entire desktop site as well. Since mobile and desktop URLs are the same, the mobile crawler will end up crawling both mobile and desktop versions of each URL. Any tips on what we can do to make sure the mobile crawler either doesn't access the desktop site, or that we can let it know what is the mobile version of the page? We could simply not show the 'View Desktop Site' to the mobile crawler, but I'm interested to hear if others have encountered this issue and have any other recommended ways for handling it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
Pagination and View All Pages Question. We currently don't have a canonical tag pointing to View all as I don't believe it's a good user experience so how best we deal with this.
Hello All, I have an eCommerce site and have implemented the use rel="prev" and rel="next" for Page Pagination. However, we also have a View All which shows all the products but we currently don't have a canonical tag pointing to this as I don't believe showing the user a page with shed loads of products on it is actually a good user experience so we havent done anything with this page. I have a sample url from one of our categories which may help - http://goo.gl/9LPDOZ This is obviously causing me duplication issues as well . Also , the main category pages has historically been the pages which ranks better as opposed to Page 2, Page 3 etc etc. I am wondering what I should do about the View All Page and has anyone else had this same issue and how did they deal with it. Do we just get rid of the View All even though Google says it prefers you to have it ? I also want to concentrate my link juice on the main category pages as opposed being diluted between all my paginated pages ? - Does anyone have any tips on how to best do this and have you seen any ranking improvement from this ? Any ideas greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Ecommerce SEO - Indexed product pages are returning 404's due to product database removal. HELP!
Hi all, I recently took over an e-commerce start-up project from one of my co-workers (who left the job last week). This previous project manager had uploaded ~2000 products without setting up a robot.txt file, and as a result, all of the product pages were indexed by Google (verified via Google Webmaster Tool). The problem came about when he deleted the entire product database from our hosting service, godaddy and performed a fresh install of Prestashop on our hosting plan. All of the created product pages are now gone, and I'm left with ~2000 broken URL's returning 404's. Currently, the site does not have any products uploaded. From my knowledge, I have to either: canonicalize the broken URL's to the new corresponding product pages, or request Google to remove the broken URL's (I believe this is only a temporary solution, for Google honors URL removal request for 90 days) What is the best way to approach this situation? If I setup a canonicalization, would I have to recreate the deleted pages (to match the URL address) and have those pages redirect to the new product pages (canonicalization)? Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | byoung860 -
Landing Page - Home Page redesign SEO factor question - Serious concern.
Hi Folks, I'm considering making a big change to our website and really need some expert advise. Will we lose ranking if we do what I propose? Our site www.meninkilts.com, needs to split users/clients by "Commercial" and "Residential" so we can message/market completely differently to each client. We are considering doing this structure: Landing Page | | Commercial Homepage Residential Homepage Right now we rank well, for our keywords like "Window Cleaning cityname" but are worried that adding a landing page, and splitting our site to two homepages will effect seo (ie: a landing page would only have two buttons: one for commercial and one for residential). What would be the best way to handle this. Looking forward to your insights! Cheers Brent
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MenInKilts0 -
What's the best theme for seo if you are going to use yoast anyway
I am going to edit my theme myself so I don't need something like thesis for that. But people say that the thesis framework is amazing for seo, and it's hard to edit it manually. Does using the thesis theme do anything for you if you are going to use yoast anyway? Thanks William
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | willie790