Many pages small unique content vs 1 page with big content
-
Dear all,
I am redesigning some areas of our website, eurasmus.com and we do not have clear what is the best
option to follow. In our site, we have a city area i.e: www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla which we are going
to redesign and a guide area where we explain about the city, etc...http://eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla/guide/
all with unique content.The thing is that at this point due to lack of resources, our guide is not really deep and we believe like this it does not
add extra value for users creating a page with 500 characters text for every area (transport...). It is not also really user friendly.
On the other hand, this pages, in long tail are getting some results though is not our keyword target (i.e. transport in sevilla)
our keyword target would be (erasmus sevilla).When redesigning the city, we have to choose between:
a)www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla -> with all the content one one page about 2500 characters unique.
b)www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla -> With better amount of content and a nice redesign but keeping
the guide pages.What would you choose?
Let me know what you think.
Thanks!
-
Wow, Jose, you got a whole audit from Luis.
1. Luis makes a good point about Seville vs Sevilla. When you're trying to target a region other than your own, make sure that you change the location in Google Keyword Planner. Seville is the English version of Sevilla (which I know sounds strange, but we also call your country Spain rather than España).
2. Both subdomains and subfolders can effectively designate different languages. If you've made the call to use subfolders, that's fine. It's probably what I would have done, too, since that means the Domain Authority will transfer easily.
4 & 5. Keyword repetition in URLs isn't necessarily bad in your case, because it's caused by a lot of subfolders.
It seems like there's been some debate here on more subfolders vs less: there isn't a hard and fast rule about it. If you have more subfolders, those pages higher up in the structure tend to get more link equity out of the deal and rank better. That takes away from deeper pages, though, which are presumably targeting the most important words. If you use fewer subfolders, the link equity will be evenly distributed, but that means that higher level pages will be weaker and deeper pages will be stronger. In your case, I don't know the answer, since I don't know how competitive different keywords are at different levels. If I were your SEO, I'd tell you to stick with your current URL structure, because moving pages to new URLs tends to cause a big knock in rankings for awhile.
-
Hi Jose,
I like your current set up, with more pages at 500 words. 500 words doesn't make for thin content from a search engine's perspective, and it means that you're delivering a more targeted result for searchers; if you don't have separate pages and they search for "restaurants in Seville," they're not going to be thrilled if they land on your mega guide page and have to search to find what they're looking for.
That said, you may want to change the language on the main Seville page so you don't call these "detailed" city guides.
Good luck!
Kristina
-
hello again,
1. Seville has 22,000 searches in UK but very few people look for Sevilla.
2. It depends, I prefer subdomain.domain.com instead of subfolders.... I only found English language at your site. Even if you use /en/ you need a main language (that could be English), and this is not necessary to have the subfolder: www.domain.com (for English), then www.domain.com/es (for Spanish).... and so on. But well is a personal decision
3. OK
4. You didnt get my point. Please read my message and my example carefully (since I checked your site carefully). It's very very important you dont repeat similar or same keywords in the same URL. In my example before it was "Seville+Sevilla" and "university+universities" in one single URL.
5. Again, the best is to have the minimum subfolder as possible! URL like this: www.eurasmus.com/erasmus-seville-city-guide are much nicer for Google than www.eurasmus.com/erasmus-sevilla/city-guide
You can keep only one if this is your strategy, or both since they have different content and context. It's up to you and if you apply a good SEO strategy I dont see any problem having two pages.
About the long tail, I already explained before. You are maybe ranking now for non-competitive keywords (study the keyword difficulty rankings for your pages/keywords) for those pages. I recommend to focus on why you are not ranking well for the pages/KW you want and optimize your strategy.
Hope this helps!
Luis
-
Hi Luis!
Thank you for your message.
I will try to answer to all your comments.1. We have done all the research of the cities already and used the one with more results.
I will recheck it, to check that it is applied everywhere.
2.We are now publishing spanish and 7 languages more, that is why we have the /en.
We decided to go for the /fr /it etc...as far as i know there is not a relevant difference, we believe.
Am I right?
3. I agree. That is why we are redesigning (also not friendly user at all).
4. It is eurasmus.com, brand name, what is not erasmus. Different words. Another chapter would be
to discuss if it is a good brand election for SEO that has been a long discussion in our company long time.
5. We will study how to make it better!Concerning my direct question, would you recommend using all the guides content in the erasmus-sevilla
home page and delete the guide area or would you leave the guide and just make more content in the home?
Main thing is that we get results for long tail but those keywords do not really generate conversion....What do you think?
-
Hi Jose,
Some advices and questions:
- Have you done a keyword analyse before? How many searches you have for your supposed "focus keywords"?After checking a little bit I see the word "Seville" is much better than "Sevilla".... foreign users call it like that
- Don't abuse of URL sublevels: /en/eramus-sevilla/guide/... (You don't need the /en/ since your site is only in English. Please, if you plan to translate to new languages you can use subdomains for this (es.eurasmus.com, fr.eurasmus.com,...)
- Add much more content to your landing page (/erasmus-sevilla is quite poor in content)
- Don't repeat keywords in the URL: http://eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla/universities/university-of-seville (here you have two repeated keywords man!)
- Make things simplier! Some ideas:
- www.euramus.com/erasmus-spain/seville-city-guide
- www.euramus.com/erasmus-spain/seville-city-transport
- www.euramus.com/erasmus-spain/seville-universities
- www.euramus.com/erasmus-spain/madrid-city-guide
- www.euramus.com/erasmus-belgium/brussels-city-guide
Long tail results for different keywords are normal and that happen. Have you tested with the Moz Grade tool if your pages need some improvements for the related keywords? That would be necessary too.
Btw, I'm Spanish so dont hesitate to send me a PM if you need more help man
Luis
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
-
Why is my home page ranking much higher than my collection page?
Hi everyone, Why is my client's home page ranking high for a certain keyword phrase rather than a collection page I have which is well optimised for this keyword? The collection page is on the 10th SERPs page. I did see there were keywords used in the footer of page and the keyword was also used in some intro text on the home page so I removed the keyword from these two places nearly 2 weeks ago and requested google to reindex both the collection page and home page and I've not seen any improvement of the collection page's ranking in SERPs. I also changed the meta description and meta title as the ctr was poor but there wasn''t that many impressions either. It is a competitive keyword organically so maybe the collection page's authority is just not good enough compared to the competitors hence why they are choosing the home page as it has higher page authority however this still is not helpful to searchers who land on home page. Does anyone have any ideas of what else I can do to get google to rank the ocllection page higher for the keyword instead of home page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TZ19820 -
URL structure - Page Path vs No Page Path
We are currently re building our URL structure for eccomerce websites. We have seen a lot of site removing the page path on product pages e.g. https://www.theiconic.co.nz/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html versus what would normally be https://www.theiconic.co.nz/womens-clothing-tops/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html Should we be removing the site page path for a product page to keep the url shorter or should we keep it? I can see that we would loose the hierarchy juice to a product page but not sure what is the right thing to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ashcastle0 -
Revamping/Re-optimizing State Pages - What to do with old content?
Hello Moz Fam! I work in the insurance industry and we serve all 50 states. We have a state page for each state where the content is thin(ish). We're slowly revamping each page and hitting every talking point for that specific state. I've used multiple tools to come up with a content template and link building template for each page as well. I spent 5 months last year proof reading all these pages. So the content is good, just not SEO good. I didn't have the team or resources to really optimize them all yet, now I do. My question is... what should I do with the old content? I was thinking of publishing it to other platforms that we have a contributor account on and linking back to each state page with it. Of course, I would wait a few days for the search engines to index the new content so it wouldn't be duplicated on these platforms. Good or bad idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE0 -
Duplicate content - how to diagnose duplicate content from another domain before publishing pages?
Hi, 🙂 My company is having new distributor contract, and we are starting to sell products on our own webshop. Bio-technology is an industry in question and over 1.000 products. Writing product description from scratch would take many hours. The plan is to re-write it. With permission from our contractors we will import their 'product description' on our webshop. But, I am concerned being penalies from Google for duplicate content. If we re-write it we should be fine i guess. But, how can we be sure? Is there any good tool for comparing only text (because i don't want to publish the pages to compare URLs)? What else should we be aware off beside checking 'product description' for duplicate content? Duplicate content is big issue for all of us, i hope this answers will be helpful for many of us. Keep it hard work and thank you very much for your answers, Cheers, Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
How much content on PDF download page
Hello, This is about content for an ecommerce site. We have an article page that we also created a PDF out of. We have an HTML page that doesn't have anything commercial on it that is the download page for the PDF page. How much of the article do you recommend we put on the non-commercial HTML download page? Should we put most of the article on there? We're trying to get people to link to the HTML Download page, not the PDF.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Duplicate Content From Indexing of non- File Extension Page
Google somehow has indexed a page of mine without the .html extension. so they indexed www.samplepage.com/page, so I am showing duplicate content because Google also see's www.samplepage.com/page.html How can I force google or bing or whoever to only index and see the page including the .html extension? I know people are saying not to use the file extension on pages, but I want to, so please anybody...HELP!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebbyNabler0 -
How many words in the same page creates keyword stuffing?
In the on page report indicates that the maximum is 15. What are the best? It includes keywords on title, description and images names?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Naghirniac0 -
How do I fix the error duplicate page content and duplicate page title?
On my site www.millsheating.co.uk I have the error message as per the question title. The conflict is coming from these two pages which are effectively the same page: www.millsheating.co.uk www.millsheating.co.uk/index I have added a htaccess file to the root folder as I thought (hoped) it would fix the problem but I doesn't appear to have done so. this is the content of the htaccess file: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^millsheating.co.uk RewriteRule (.*) http://www.millsheating.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.millsheating.co.uk/ [R=301,L] AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonHegarty0