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.
Creating 100,000's of pages, good or bad idea
-
Hi Folks,
Over the last 10 months we have focused on quality pages but have been frustrated with competition websites out ranking us because they have bigger sites. Should we focus on the long tail again?
One option for us is to take every town across the UK and create pages using our activities. e.g.
Stirling
Stirling paintball
Stirling Go Karting
Stirling Clay shootingWe are not going to link to these pages directly from our main menus but from the site map.
These pages would then show activities that were in a 50 mile radius of the towns. At the moment we have have focused our efforts on Regions, e.g. Paintball Scotland, Paintball Yorkshire focusing all the internal link juice to these regional pages, but we don't rank high for towns that the activity sites are close to.
With 45,000 towns and 250 activities we could create over a million pages which seems very excessive! Would creating 500,000 of these types of pages damage our site? This is my main worry, or would it make our site rank even higher for the tougher keywords and also get lots of traffic from the long tail like we used to get.
Is there a limit to how big a site should be?
-
Hi Mark!
Thanks for asking this good question. While there is no limit to how big a website can be, I think you can see from the general response here that most members would encourage you to stick to manually developing quality pages rather than automating hundreds of thousands of pages, solely for ranking purposes. I second this advice.
Now, I would like to clarify your business model. Are you a physical, actual business that customers come to, either to buy paintball equipment or to play paintball in a gallery? Or, is your business virtual, with no in person transactions? I'm not quite understanding this from your description.
If the former, I would certainly encourage you to develop a very strong, unique page for each of your physical locations. If you have 10 locations (with unique street addresses and phone numbers), then that would be 10 pages. If you've got 20 locations, that would be 20 pages, etc. But don't approach these with a 'just switch out the city name in the title tags' mindset. Make these pages as exceptional as possible. Tell stories, show off testimonials, share pictures and videos, entertain, educate, inspire. These city landing pages will be intimately linked into your whole Local SEM campaign, provided they each represent a business location with a unique dedicated street address and unique local area code phone number.
But, if you are considering simply building a page for every city in the UK, I just can't see justification for doing so. Ask yourself - what is the value?
There are business models (such as carpet cleaners, chimney sweeps, general contractors, etc.) that go to their clients' locations to serve and for which I would be advising that they create city landing pages for each of their service cities, but this would be extremely regional...not statewide or national or International. A carpet cleaner might serve 15 different towns and cities in his region, and I would encourage him to start gathering project notes and testimonials, videos and photos to begin developing a body of content important enough for him to start creating strong, interesting and unique pages for each of these cities. But I've also had local business owners tell me they want to cover every city in California, for instance, because they think it will help them to do so, and I discourage this.
Even if the business is virtual and doesn't have any in-person transactions with clients or physical locations, I would still discourage this blanketing-the-whole-nation-with-pages approach. A national retailer needs to build up its brand so that it becomes known and visible organically for its products rather than your theoretical approach of targeting every city in the nation. In short order, the mindset behind that approach just doesn't make good horse sense.
And, as others have stated, adding thousands of thin, potentially duplicate pages to any site could definitely have a very negative effect on rankings.
My advice is to make the time to start developing a content strategy for cities in which you have a legitimate presence. If budget means you can't hire a copywriter to help you with this and to speed up the work, accept that this project deserves all the time you can give it and that a slow development of exceptional pages is better than a fast automation of poor quality pages.
Hope this helps!
-
Hi Mark,
If A,C, and E's page is similar to B,D, and F's page it is still consider dupllicate content. Based on Webmaster's definiton:
"Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar"
Each of your pages should be unique and different from other pages.
I suggest you to continue providing quality content and target the long tail keywords. That alone will help you generate more traffic. Furthermore, out ranking is not a problem. You should focus on getting to the frist page (providing quality content with long tail or regular keywords) and when you are on the first page, try to get searchers to click on your link using Title tag and Meta descriptions.
Out ranking just means they are ranked 4th and you are ranked 5th, 6th but as long as you have a better title tag and meta description. I believe searchers will click on the more attractive results.
-
Cookie cutter pages like these stopped working in Google about ten years ago.
If you toss them up I think that your entire site will tank.
I would go back to focusing on quality pages.
-
If the user experience awesome, and people are staying on your site and looking around, great. If you think the 100,000 pages will make search engines love you, machines can never provide the love users can give you.
-
Can you mix content up from your website e.g. paintball site A, C and E on one page and B,D and F on another if the towns are close together? What I'm not sure about is how different in % terms the content actually has to be.
If we have less written content then the amounts of words we have to actually change would be much less.
The challenge we have is we have build the site this time with filtering in mind, so rather than making customers navigate we allow them to be able to search which is much better in terms of getting the activities they want. The downside is now our site does not show for the long tail as we reduced the pages massively.
-
so we dont have the resources if we did it manually but what would happen is the content would be different on each page as we would only show activity sites within a 50 miles radius. And we would make certain text, h1 etc different and relate to the town.
Below are some examples of sites I see doing well ie number 1 using this method
Our content would be much better than say http://www.justpaintballDOTcoDOTuk/site_guide/Aberfeldy.htm or http://www.goballisticDOTcoDOTuk/paintball_in_/ABERFELDY.asp
But as you say getting this wrong is my worry.
-
Hi Mark,
Creating 100,000 pages is definitely good for Search Engine because you have a lot more contents for them to crawl and have more chances your pages might show up on related keywords. However, the problem is do you have enough unique contents you can post on all those 100,000 pages. If you use similar content, I am afraid it will be duplicate contents. You may think changing up the town names will be enough but it might be risky.
If you can create 100,000 unique contents, Sure go ahead. If not, don't take the risk of duplicate contents.
-
Do you have the resources to create unique content for all those pages? Because adding 500,000 pages of duplicate content will absolutely damage your site.
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't generate a sitemap with all my pages
I am trying to generate a site map for my site nationalcurrencyvalues.com but all the tools I have tried don't get all my 70000 html pages... I have found that the one at check-domains.com crawls all my pages but when it writes the xml file most of them are gone... seemingly randomly. I have used this same site before and it worked without a problem. Can anyone help me understand why this is or point me to a utility that will map all of the pages? Kindly, Greg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Banknotes0 -
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 -
Does Google Read URL's if they include a # tag? Re: SEO Value of Clean Url's
An ECWID rep stated in regards to an inquiry about how the ECWID url's are not customizable, that "an important thing is that it doesn't matter what these URLs look like, because search engines don't read anything after that # in URLs. " Example http://www.runningboards4less.com/general-motors#!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 Basically all of this: #!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 That is a snippet out of a conversation where ECWID said that dirty urls don't matter beyond a hashtag... Is that true? I haven't found any rule that Google or other search engines (Google is really the most important) don't index, read, or place value on the part of the url after a # tag.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Using the same content on different TLD's
HI Everyone, We have clients for whom we are going to work with in different countries but sometimes with the same language. For example we might have a client in a competitive niche working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Swiss German) ie we're going to potentially rewrite our website three times in German, We're thinking of using Google's href lang tags and use pretty much the same content - is this a safe option, has anyone actually tries this successfully or otherwise? All answers appreciated. Cheers, Mel.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dancape1 -
Meta Keywords Good or Bad
Hi All, I've been reading more about the meta keyword tag and why it may not be a good idea to include them on pages and am looking for thoughts/feedback on this idea. If you have employed this tactic, can you give me some insight into any results you saw. If you decided to not employ this tactic, why did you choose not to? I wan to understand all sides of this before employing any changes to my company's websites. Thank you for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | airnwater0 -
How to prevent 404's from a job board ?
I have a new client with a job listing board on their site. I am getting a bunch of 404 errors as they delete the filled jobs. Question: Should we leave the the jobs pages up for extra content and entry points to the site and put a notice like this job has been filled, please search our other job listings ? Or should I no index - no follow these pages ? Or any other suggestions - it is an employment agency site. Overall what would be the best practice going forward - we are looking at probably 20 jobs / pages per month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90 -
Does Google crawl the pages which are generated via the site's search box queries?
For example, if I search for an 'x' item in a site's search box and if the site displays a list of results based on the query, would that page be crawled? I am asking this question because this would be a URL that is non existent on the site and hence am confused as to whether Google bots would be able to find it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0 -
Tool to calculate the number of pages in Google's index?
When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0