Is Creating a Lot of Content A Bad SEO Strategy?

[SparkplugDigital]

In Danny Dover's book, Search Engine Optimization Secrets, he talks about how every page on your site should be at least a little linkworthy, or it is just sucking link juice from the rest of the site and not contributing any.

Does this mean that creating a lot of content, (like a daily news article on your site that summarizes industry news or something similar) is not a good SEO strategy?

Should you limit the amount of content pages on your site unless it can attract links or hits on one of your target keywords?

Thanks!

[EGOL]

Thanks for your thoughts, Alan.  Much appreciated.

I agree that "quality" is the key.

[AlanBleiweiss]

I think it all comes down to the quality of the content, the ease of readability, and the ability to not diverge too far from the primary topic.

I personally find pages that are endless content, such as blog indexes that load entire articles on the page, to be quite annoying.  In that scenario, helping SEO is outweighed by harming user experience.  And if the sub-topics wander too far, it can dilute the primary topical focus of the page.

So with proper planning, and user experience considerations, sure, it can be done.  Heck, there's a common belief that short blog articles are better than long ones. Yet some of my best, most read, most linked-to blog articles have gone on seemingly forever.

On the flip side, my "Anatomy of an SEO Audit" articles were each strong enough on their own that it was best to split it out into four pieces.  Not only did it make readability a bit more reasonable, it gave me three additional "new content" opportunities, and I got to link across all of them by the 4th article,  Yet two more valid SEO factors to consider.

[EGOL]

Alan,

I am interested in your comment.  I agree with the "supporting pages" idea and employ that on many parts of my websites.  The main page attacks a primary keyword and the supporting pages attack secondary keywords.  The anchor text links between the pages might help the rankings.

However, I am also finding success with another method...

Place all of the content on one page to create a very long and impressive document.  The length (and word diversity) causes that page to pull a lot of long-tail traffic. Also, the size of these documents might make a favorable impression on other webmasters who are looking for an authoritative document to link to.  Maybe Google also favorably considers the length and subtopic diversity of these documents?

Another variation would be to treat the article like the index page of a blog that has the full text of each blog post displayed.  Each of the subtopics is a subheading on that page and the <h>tag used for the subheading is linktext to a secondary page with full text and images displayed.</h>

Any thoughts on those?

[AlanBleiweiss]

I'd offer a slightly different perspective.

If you create lots of content that supports a higher level page, many of those supporting pages might very well not ever garner any external links.  Yet they very well could offer tremendous value in boosting the primary page's value from an internal linking perspective as well as an inbound link perspective.

For example - if you want to be known as THE AUTHORITY on all things related to widgets,  you'd be wise to have many second and even third tier content pages within your site structure.  The vast majority, if not all of the inbound links would point to the higher level pages exactly BECAUSE you've got all that depth.

[Dan-Petrovic]

• Creating a lot of bad content is a bad strategy.
• Creating a lot of good content is a good strategy.

(Assuming it's done in balance with your capacity.)

Content is the king but a kingdom needs other roles to run smoothly so I would not completely sacrifice other SEO activities just to satisfy monthly content needs.

One example of content being a problem is when too many pages discuss the same topic and fragment your inbound links, diluting the effect. This would only be good if that was only way to get as many diverse inbound links.

[EGOL]

Should you limit the amount of content pages on your site unless it can attract links or hits on one of your target keywords?

In general, the answer to this is YES, don't put up pages that are not going to attract links or search traffic.  The exception would be pages on topics such as "ordering information"... "privacy policy".... etc.

Why put up a page if it will be useless?

Does this mean that creating a lot of content, (like a daily news article on your site that summarizes industry news or something similar) is not a good SEO strategy?

If you run a content site the best way to bring in "new money" is to publish new content.  However, you might be careful about creating pages about "news".  Those pages might be "new content" but they become "old content" quickly.

If you are going to have a site that places an emphasis on news and does a good job of it then publishing news is a good idea.  However, if you have any other goal then a focus on "evergreen" content might be a better strategy.