Does many unique pages mean better SERP position?
-
My site has about 50 pages. All of them are unique 500-700 word articles. Almost every page is on its keyword at the 4-8 position in google/yahoo/bing.
I can add a lot of relative unique pages on my site, about 100-200 word content per page. They all will be unique, with unique description and title. I can make about 1000+ pages.
Would you suggest me to do this? Will this action boost my SERP position.
Do more pages mean better SERP position?
-
More pages doesn't always mean better SERP position. There is no black and white answer on this. Here is a helpful excerpt from a recent blog by Dr. Pete :
A common example is when you take a page of content and spin it off across 100s of cities or topics, changing up the header and a few strategic keywords. In the old days, the worst that could happen is that these pages would be ignored. Post-Panda, you risk much more severe consequences, especially if those pages make up a large percentage of your overall content.
Another common scenario is deep product pages that only vary by a small piece of information, such as the color of the product or the size. Take a T-shirt site, for example – any given style could come in dozens of combinations of gender, color, and size. These pages are completely legitimate, from a user perspective, but once they multiple into the 1000s, they may look like low-value content to Google.
The Solution
Unfortunately, this is a case where you might have to bite the bullet and block these pages (such as with META NOINDEX). For the second scenario, I think that can be a decent bet. You might be better off focusing your ranking power on one product page for the T-shirt instead of every single variation. In the geo-keyword example, it’s a bit tougher, since you built those pages specifically to rank. If you’re facing large-scale filtering or devaluation, though, blocking those pages is better than the alternative. You may want to focus on just the most valuable pages and prune those near duplicates down to a few dozen instead of a few thousand. Alternatively, you’ve got to find a way to add content value, beyond just a few swapped-out keywords.
In your case, if you are able to truly make pages that are unique, valuable, and genuinely helpful to users, you definitely stand to benefit your overall traffic. However, If I were in your position I would focus on making more like 50-100 pages with better, higher quality content, rather than 1000's of pages with just a little content.
-
You could take that approach, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.
In most cases, 100-200 words is not enough to represent great content. It is possible, but I don't think it is realistic for 1000 pages. Even dictionary pages offer more content.
With that said, if your pages attract attention (i.e. you get users to those pages and they link to or Like/Tweet/+1), then those pages can help improve the SERP of your other pages through good anchor text.
I would suggest a lot of caution here because you risk lowering the overall quality of your site. I would prefer a 50 page site with good content over a 1050 page site with 50 good pages and 1000 low quality pages. No one wants to wade through the bad pages to find the good ones.
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
-
Article page canonicalization
Hey there, A client rents all kinds of party articles, like plates, bowles, etc. Currently, al his article pages have canonicals to their parent category pages, supposedly to have any pagevalue flow to these category pages, (which are much more relevant for SEO). Is there anyone who agrees with this method? I think a noindex,follow would be a better measure to prevent Google from accessing all these 'low value' article pages. Besides, a canonical should indicate that page A and B are (almost) identical, which they most certainly are not in this case. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Can noindexed pages accrue page authority?
My company's site has a large set of pages (tens of thousands) that have very thin or no content. They typically target a single low-competition keyword (and typically rank very well), but the pages have a very high bounce rate and are definitely hurting our domain's overall rankings via Panda (quality ranking). I'm planning on recommending we noindexed these pages temporarily, and reindex each page as resources are able to fill in content. My question is whether an individual page will be able to accrue any page authority for that target term while noindexed. We DO want to rank for all those terms, just not until we have the content to back it up. However, we're in a pretty competitive space up against domains that have been around a lot longer and have higher domain authorities. Like I said, these pages rank well right now, even with thin content. The worry is if we noindex them while we slowly build out content, will our competitors get the edge on those terms (with their subpar but continually available content)? Do you think Google will give us any credit for having had the page all along, just not always indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | THandorf0 -
Switched to HTTPS, now Google ALWAYS changes Page Title & Meta in SERPs
Wordpress website using Yoast. Website switched over from HTTP to HTTPS successfully about 6 months ago. Noticed after the fact that Google almost never displays the Page Title or Meta Description I've created in Yoast. Yoast is the only SEO plug-in enabled. Yoast is set to Force Rewrite the Page TItles. The Page titles & Meta Descriptions are always within the character limit. They also contain either an exact or partial match the queries in which Google shows a different Page Title & Meta Description. For some Queries, Google will display the URL as the Page Title for certain queries. Concrete example, search for: public administration jobs Screenshot of results attached. First time working with HTTPS. The redirects appear to be have done correctly. I'm not sure what the issue is. uOnFjNt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 2uinc0 -
Help With This Page
This is page - http://www.kempruge.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-legal-attorneys/ - is the most important one to my business, and I can't seem to get it to rank higher. It has the second highest authority and links, second only to my homepage (though none are all that impressive) but it is just buried in the SERPs. Granted, I know Tampa Personal Injury Attorney is the hardest keyword for us to rank for, but there must be some way to improve this. I know getting high quality links is an appropriate answer, but I'm looking for anything I can do solely on my end to improve it. However, if anyone has some ways to make the page more linkable, I'm all ears! Please, if you have a second to take a look, I'd appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
301 page into a 404
Hi I have a job board site and the way the site is built means that I cant 404 job pages once they have expired. To combat this Im looking to 301 the pages into a 404 page.Do any of you have any experience with this? Are there any potential pitfalls to doing a 404 this way? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewAkesson0 -
Can a home page penalty cause a drop in rankings for all pages?
All my main keywords have dropped out of the SERPS. Could it be that the home page (the strongest) page has been devalued and therefore 'link juice' that used to spread throughout the site is no longer doing so. Would this cause all other pages to drop? I just can't understand how all my pages have lost rankings. The site is still indexed so there's no problem there.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Google + Local Pages
Hi, If I have a company with multipul addresses, Do I create separate Google + page for each area?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
Linking to local pages on main page - keyword self-cannibalization issue?
Hi guys, Our website has this landing page: www.example.com/service1/ Is this considered keyword self-cannibalization if on the above page we link to local pages such as: www.example.com/service1-in-chicago/ www.example.com/service1-in-newyork/ www.example.com/service1-in-texas/ Many thanks David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sssrpm0