SEO Content Revolution Question
-
I was wondering if articles written about questions people are asking will help my website rank better.
For example let's say I wrote an article answering the query, "What Hair Dye Does Angela Merkel Use?" or, "Is Hillary Clinton Thinking of Running for President," and they rank well on google, and in turn they get viewed a lot by searchers because it answers their queries. Would this help my website as whole start ranking better?
Thanks!
-
In the past, page titles, structured as questions have done reasonably well since they were often close to the query typed by many users.
In the future, however, I'd expect to see the following 2 broad changes:
- Knowledge graph answers to more popular and basic questions (meaning it's not worth much time to create these types of pages).
- Hummingbird changes to how queries are answered. From what I've read it appears that part of Hummingbird was about better analyzing the structure and meaning of queries, rather than simply matching keywords. To me that would suggest that the page types you're talking about will be less and less valuable.
Because of that, I wouldn't dedicate as much time to these types of content as I would have a couple years ago. Harder questions or Q&A type content will always have it's place, however.
Getting back to your question of "Would [having pages ranked that get lots of views] help my website as whole start ranking better?", I'd say yes, but not simply because the pages are ranking. It's more likely that they'd attract some links and social shares for the site (assuming they're decent quality pages), which would provide more benefit. That said, I'd only spend time on content that's closely matched with the topic of the rest of your site - creating these random pages won't add much benefit if they're not related to the rest of the site.
-
Thanks for your help guys!
-
Hi there
Everything that Google has told us so far indicates that Analytics stat, such as click through rates, time on site, bounce rate etc. do not have an affect on organic rankings. Here is the video on the topic from a (bald-headed) Matt Cutts.
Now, you should always take those videos with a pinch of salt, but I inclined to believe that views/time on site etc. do not fundamentally improve your chances of ranking.
However, those kind of articles you are writing about - informational, relevant, contextual articles - are exactly the kind of content that can rank for core terms. I have on multiple occasions seen websites rank for a term, let's say "blue widgets", by producing a landing page with the title "what are blue widgets" and then information about it. If you throw in the proposed changes in the hummingbird update, you'd expect content like this to do even better.
So, getting pages on your site with a lot of views will not fundamentally "improve" your domain's SEO, as it were. But writing content like the kind you mentioned is a great way to improve your SEO anyway.
Hope these links help.
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
-
Affect of ™ and ® in title for SEO
I am looking at adding the trademark and rights reserved symbols to some of my titles. I think this might help with click through rate. From what I have found, this shouldn't have an affect on SEO unless it makes the title too long. Is this correct? Stephen
On-Page Optimization | | stephen.volker1 -
Acquired Old, Bad Content Site That Ranks Great. Redirect to Content on My Site?
Hello. my company acquired another website. This website is very old, the content within is decent at best, but still manages to rank very well for valuable phrases. Currently, we're leaving the entire site active on its own for its brand, but i'd like to at least redirect some of the content back to our main website. I can't justify spending the time to create improved content on that site and not our main site though. What would be the best practice here? 1. Cross-domain canonical - and build the new content on our main website? 2. 301 Redirect Old Article to New Location containing better article 3. Leave the content where it is - you won't be able to transfer the ranking across domain. Thanks for your input.
On-Page Optimization | | Blenny0 -
ECommerce Filtering Affect on SEO
I'm building an eCommerce website which has an advanced filter on the left hand side of the category pages. It allows users to tick boxes for colours, sizes, materials, and so on. When they've made their choices they submit (this will likely be an AJAX thing in a future release, but isn't at time of writing). The new filtered page has a new URL, which is made up of the IDs of the filter's they've ticked - it's a bit like /department/2/17-7-4/10/ My concern is that the filtered pages are, on the most part, going to be the same as the parent. Which may lead to duplicate content. My other concern is that these two URLs would lead to the exact same page (although the system would never generate the 'wrong' URL) /department/2/17-7-4/10/ /department/2/**10/**17-7-4/ But I can't think of a way of canonicalising that automatically. Tricky. So the meat of the question is this: should I worry about this causing issues with the SEO - or can I have trust in Google to work it out?
On-Page Optimization | | AndieF0 -
Site restructure question
Our site was deigned years ago to target customers in specific cities, now we've grown beyond this and I believe it is time to change the site structure.
On-Page Optimization | | PM_Academy
Ignore the 302 from the root page. Current structure: (assuming you've never been to our site before) projectmanagementacademy.net 302->/select-location.php /select-location.php -> /city-name/pmp-training.php This page was meant to be a "homepage" for each city, pointless page really /city-name/pmp-training.php -> /ciy-name/product-name.php These pages are for each individual product My suggested site structure: /city-name/pmp-training.php becomes projectmanagementacademy.net no more redirect /city-name/pmp-training.php gets removed and 301 to root page. /product-name.php each product's page and you would select a location when necessary (some products are online only) would 301 each /city-name/product-name to corresponding product page /product-name/city-name.php could add these pages if we still wanted the city name in url for city specific products My thoughts here are /product-name.php would receive a higher % of link juice because there are fewer page between 2 vs 4 if you came to the root page. and 2 vs 3 if you came from the select-location page. Also instead of being split between over 50 locations, all these would be together on one page. Your thoughts? Would this change improve our SERP for those product pages? Would we see a drop off in traffic if we did this? How long, if done correctly, would it take to see the recovery of rankings and traffic? Could we 301 /select-location.php to the root page? Thanks in advance for your insights to this. Any answer is a good answer. Trenton0 -
On Page SEO Tool
Hello - I'm looking for one tool that does the following and was wondering if anyone knew of such a tool? In a perfect world I would like to enter in one domain name and have a report generated that shows All Internal links, link titles, and anchor text All internal broken links / redirects All images, image size and image alt, if the image alt is missing. I'd love to be about to export these reports to excel and quickly run my on page optimization. The goal is to produce a checklist for a developer to execute quickly. Thanks for your help Gabe
On-Page Optimization | | Gabe0 -
New website launch - Dupilicate content question
Hi, We are going to be launching a US version of our UK E-commerce web store. The US version will be a standalone site, separate URL/hosting etc. My question is that the US website will carry the same products as the UK site - will the product copy have to be written differently for the US website in order to avoid any SEO duplicate copy? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | WalesDragon0 -
Sliders and Content Above the Fold
I was just inspecting a wire frame that is going out to a client and realized that the slider may interfere with the "content above the fold." Can't believe this had not struck me on others. If the Header has basic business info, etc. in it and you place a slider to display images in the area just beneath the Header or slightly down from it, does that decrease the amount of content seen a being above the fold? Or, is content above the fold established by virtue of H1,2, 3, etc.?
On-Page Optimization | | RobertFisher0 -
Link juice question
In theory: If i have a page with only two outgoing, do-follow links,
On-Page Optimization | | elgoog
and both have the same target,
only the first one will be counted.. right? Will that link pass 100% or 50% of the link juice? (if the anchor text is the same or different does not make any difference i think)0