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.
Page content length...does it matter?
-
As I begin developing my website's content, does it matter how long or short the actual text found in the is? I heard someone say before "a minimum of 250 words", but is that true? If so, what is the maximum length I should use?
-
Absolutely. Flimsy pages will have a hard time ranking, and if all pages on your site consists of all flimsy pages you'll get hit by panda and even if you aren't hit by panda, high competition keywords will be difficult to rank for with weak content.
Anything less than 250 words is flimsy IMO. Don't write for SEO if you care about the user and conversions, don't over optimize and be sure to use similar phrases and industry words so that Google can tell that your site really is about that keyword and not just an article with that keyword thrown in for SEO.
-
As others have said, it really depends on the topic. Personally, I find that pages with 700 to 1,000 words seem to perform best for me.
-
I don't think there's any maximum limit, unless the page gets so long that load time is impacted. If we're talking thousands of words, you might want to paginate.
I also don't believe there's a hard-and-fast minimum, but you need enough text for Google to understand what the page is about, and to make sure it's distinct from other pages on your site and doesn't get interpreted as a duplicate page. A few hundred words is a nice target, because that gives you room to repeat your keyword(s) a few times and include a few variations and some longtail bait, but 100 words might be enough.
-
I think it depends on the topic, if you have no competition, a couple of lines can get good positions, but if your subject is very competitive, you should have more text on your page.
PS: Remember to write quality articles or your bounce rates will be very high and will cause you to lose positions.
-
The length of the content should be based on the actual content itself being presented and the visitor experience. If the information can be provided to the client in 250 words then that's what the length of the page should be.
Here's a link to a good post discussing this topic.
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
-
Landing page separate from product page
Hello there, I have a wordpress website with a woocommerce plugin. I have 4 landing pages that describe my products and at the end of the pages, I have a CTA to my product page. is it bad for SEO? my website: https://relationadviser.ir
On-Page Optimization | | Aaron.be1 -
Page Title Length
Hi Gurus, I understand that it is a good practice is to use 50-60 characters for the a page title length. Google appends my brand name to the end of each title (15 characters including spaces) it index. Do I need to count what google adds as part of the maximum recommended length? i.e.
On-Page Optimization | | SunnyMay
is the maximum 50-60 characters + the 15 characters brand name Google adds to the end of the title or 50-60 including the addition? Many thanks!
Lev0 -
Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
When writing content for a website what is the optimal copy length?
My site is currently in the mist of a redesign and I’d like us to compile some recommendations on the length of copy for a page to rank well but can't seem to find any up to date articles on this.Does anyone have any suggestions, comments, or feedback?Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | PorshaAndrea0 -
Duplicate Content with ?Page ID's in WordPress
Hi there, I'm trying to figure out the best way to solve a duplicate content problem that I have due to Page ID's that WordPress automatically assigns to pages. I know that in order for me to resolve this I have to use canonical urls but the problem for me is I can't figure out the URL structure. Moz is showing me thousands of duplicate content errors that are mostly related to Page IDs For example, this is how a page's url should look like on my site Moz is telling me there are 50 duplicate content errors for this page. The page ID for this page is 82 so the duplicate content errors appear as follows and so on. For 47 more pages. The problem repeats itself with other pages as well. My permalinks are set to "Post Name" so I know that's not an issue. What can I do to resolve this? How can I use canonical URLs to solve this problem. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | SpaMedica0 -
Add content as blog post or to product pages?
Hi, We have around 40 products which we can produce plenty of in-depth and detailed "how to"-type pieces of content for. Our current plan is to produce a "How to make" style post for each as a long blog post, then link that to the product page. There's probably half a dozen or more of these kind of blog posts that we could do for each product. The reason why we planned on doing it like this is that it would give us plenty of extra pages (blog posts) on their own URL which can be indexed and rank for long tail keywords, but also that we can mention these posts in our newsletter. It'd give people a new page full of specific content that they can read instead of us having to say "Hey! We've updated our product page for X!", which seems a little pointless. Most of the products we sell don't get very many searches themselves; Most get a couple dozen and the odd few get 100-300 each, while one gets more than 2,000 per month. The products don't get many searches as it's a relatively unknown niche when it comes to details, but searches for the "categories" these products are in are very well known (Some broad terms that cover the niche get more than 30,000+ searches a month in the UK and 100,000+ world wide) [Exact].
On-Page Optimization | | azu25
Regarding the one product with more than 2,000 searches; This keyword is both the name of the product and also a name for the category page. Many of our competitors have just one of these products, whereas we're one of the first to have more than 6 variations of this product, thus the category page is acting like our other product pages and the information you would usually find on our product pages, is on the category page for just this product. I'm still leaning towards creating each piece of content as it's own blog post which links to the product pages, while the product pages link to the relevant blog posts, but i'm starting to think that it may be be better to put all the content on the product pages themselves). The only problem with this is that it cuts out on more than 200 very indepth and long blog posts (which due to the amount of content, videos and potentially dozens of high resolution images may slow down the loading of the product pages). From what I can see, here are the pros and cons: Pro (For blog posts):
1. More than 200 blog posts (potentially 1000+ words each with dozens of photos and potentially a video)..
2. More pages to crawl, index and rank..
3. More pages to post on social media..
4. Able to comment about the posts in the newsletter - Sounds more unique than "We've just updated this product page"..
5. Commenting is available on blog posts, whereas it is not on product pages..
6. So much information could slow down the loading of product pages significantly..
7. Some products are very similar (ie, the same product but "better quality" - Difficult to explain without giving the niche away, which i'd prefer not to do ATM) and this would mean the same content isn't on multiple pages.
8. By my understanding, this would be better for Google Authorship/Publishership.. Con (Against blog posts. For extended product pages):
1. Customers have all information in one place and don't have to click on a "Related Blog posts" tab..
2. More content means better ability to rank for product related keywords (All but a few receive very few searches per month, but the niche is exploding at an amazing rate at the moment)..
3. Very little chance of a blog post out-ranking the related product page for keywords.. I've run out of ideas for the 'Con' side of things, but that's why I'd like opinions from someone here if possible. I'd really appreciate any and all input, Thanks! [EDIT]:
I should add that there will be a small "How to make" style section on product pages anyway, which covers the most common step by step instructions. In the content we planned for blog posts, we'd explore the regular method in greater detail and several other methods in good detail. Our products can be "made" in several different ways which each result in a unique end result (some people may prefer it one way than another, so we want to cover every possible method), effectively meaning that there's an almost unlimited amount of content we could write.
In fact, you could probably think of the blog posts as more of "an ultimate guide to X" instead of simply "How to X"...0 -
Home page or landing page?
Hello, I want to ask a question related to that - Should we put keywords in the home page title if we wish to position another landing page better for particular keywords? I have read in one website about SEO that it's good the main keywords of your website to be positioned in homepage title also. f.e. Let's say we have website about web-design and our company is named Company Ltd. The title of the home page is "Company Ltd. - Web design, SEO, etc" We have also another inner page named "Web design | Company Ltd.". So should we leave the first page name only "Company Ltd." and the landing page's name "Web design | Company Ltd." . I don't know if they both have the same keyword in their title they won't compete with each other.
On-Page Optimization | | HrishikeshKarov0 -
Is there a SEO penalty for multi links on same page going to same destination page?
Hi, Just a quick note. I hope you are able to assist. To cut a long story short, on the page below http://www.bookbluemountains.com.au/ -> Features Specials & Packages (middle column) we have 3 links per special going to the same page.
On-Page Optimization | | daveupton
1. Header is linked
2. Click on image link - currently with a no follow
3. 'More info' under the description paragraph is linked too - currently with a no follow Two arguments are as follows:
1. The reason we do not follow all 3 links is to reduce too many links which may appear spammy to Google. 2. Counter argument:
The point above has some validity, However, using no follow is basically telling the search engines that the webmaster “does not trust or doesn’t take responsibility” for what is behind the link, something you don’t want to do within your own website. There is no penalty as such for having too many links, the search engines will generally not worry after a certain number.. nothing that would concern this business though. I would suggest changing the no follow links a.s.a.p. Could you please advise thoughts. Many thanks Dave Upton [long signature removed by staff]0