How do the Quoras of this world index their content?
-
I am helping a client index lots and lots of pages, more than one million pages. They can be seen as questions on Quora. In the Quora case, users are often looking for the answer on a specific question, nothing else.
On Quora there is a structure setup on the homepage to let the spiders in. But I think mostly it is done with a lot of sitemaps and internal linking in relevancy terms and nothing else... Correct? Or am I missing something?
I am going to index about a million question and answers, just like Quora. Now I have a hard time dealing with structuring these questions without just doing it for the search engines. Because nobody cares about structuring these questions. The user is interested in related questions and/or popular questions, so I want to structure them in that way too.
This way every question page will be in the sitemap, but not all questions will have links from other question pages linking to them. These questions are super longtail and the idea is that when somebody searches this exact question we can supply them with the answer (onpage will be perfectly optimised for people searching this question). Competition is super low because it is all unique user generated content.
I think best is just to put them in sitemaps and use an internal linking algorithm to make the popular and related questions rank better. I could even make sure every question has at least one other page linking to it, thoughts?
Moz, do you think when publishing one million pages with quality Q/A pages, this strategy is enough to index them and to rank for the question searches? Or do I need to design a structure around it so it will all be crawled and each question will also receive at least one link from a "category" page.
-
Wow, that is insane right?
https://www.quora.com/sitemap/questions?page_id=50
I wonder how long this carries on.
-
Quora don't seem to have a XML sitemap but a HTML one :
[https://www.quora.com/robots.txt](https://www.quora.com/robots.txt) refers to [https://www.quora.com/sitemap](https://www.quora.com/sitemap)
-
Yes there are many challenges and external linking is definitely one of them.
What do you think about sitemaps to get this longtail indexed? I think that a lot can be indexed by submitting the sitemaps.
-
There are many challenges to building a really large site. Most of them are related to building the site, but one that often kills the success of the site is the ability to get the pages into the index and keep them there. This requires a steady flow of spiders into the deepest pages of the site. If you don't have continuous and repetitive spider flow the pages will be indexed, but then forgotten, before the spiders return.
An effective way to get deep spidering is have powerful links permanently connected to many deep hub pages throughout the site. This produces a flow of spiders into the site and forces them to chew their way out, indexing pages as they go. These links must be powerful or the spiders will index a couple of pages and die. These links must be permanent because if they are removed the flow of spiders will stop and pages in the index will be forgotten.
The goal of the hub pages is to create spider webs through the site that allow spiders to index all of the pages on short link paths, rather than requiring the spiders to crawl through long tunnels of many consecutive links to get everything indexed.
Lots of people can build a big site, but only some of those people have the resources to get the powerful, permanent links that are required to get the pages indexed and keep them in the index. You can't rely on internal links alone for the powerful, permanent links because most spiders that enter any site come from external sources rather than spontaneously springing up deep in the bowels of your website.
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
-
Google Indexing Stopped
Hello Team, A month ago, Google was indexing more than 2,35,000 pages, now has reduced to 11K. I have cross-checked almost everything including content, backlinks and schemas. Everything is looking fine, except the server response time, being a heavy website, or may be due to server issues, the website has an average loading time of 4 secs. Also, I would like to mention that I have been using same server since I have started working on the website, and as said above a month ago the indexing rate was more than 2.3 M, now reduced to 11K. nothing changed. As I have tried my level best on doing research for the same, so please if you had any such experiences, do share your valuable solutions to this problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeffreyjohnson0 -
Scraped content ranking above the original source content in Google.
I need insights on how “scraped” content (exact copy-pasted version) rank above the original content in Google. 4 original, in-depth articles published by my client (an online publisher) are republished by another company (which happens to be briefly mentioned in all four of those articles). We reckon the articles were re-published at least a day or two after the original articles were published (exact gap is not known). We find that all four of the “copied” articles rank at the top of Google search results whereas the original content i.e. my client website does not show up in the even in the top 50 or 60 results. We have looked at numerous factors such as Domain authority, Page authority, in-bound links to both the original source as well as the URLs of the copied pages, social metrics etc. All of the metrics, as shown by tools like Moz, are better for the source website than for the re-publisher. We have also compared results in different geographies to see if any geographical bias was affecting results, reason being our client’s website is hosted in the UK and the ‘re-publisher’ is from another country--- but we found the same results. We are also not aware of any manual actions taken against our client website (at least based on messages on Search Console). Any other factors that can explain this serious anomaly--- which seems to be a disincentive for somebody creating highly relevant original content. We recognize that our client has the option to submit a ‘Scraper Content’ form to Google--- but we are less keen to go down that route and more keen to understand why this problem could arise in the first place. Please suggest.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ontarget-media0 -
Block lightbox content
I'm working on a new website with aggregator of content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPalmer
i'll show to my users content from another website in my website in LIGHTBOX windows when they'll click on the title of the items. ** I don't have specific url for these items.
What is the best way to say for SE "Don't index these pages"?0 -
Duplicated Content with Index.php
Good Afternoon, My website uses Joomla CMS and has the htaccess rewrite code enabled to ensure the use of search engine friendly URLs (SEF's). While browsing the crawl diagnostics I have found that Moz considers the /index.php URL a duplicate to our root. I will always under the impression that the htaccess rewrite took care of that issue and obviously I would like to address it. I attempted to create a 301 redirect from the index.php URL to the root but ran into an issue when attempting to login to the admin portion of the website as the redirect sent me back to the homepage. I was curious if anyone had advice for handling the index.php duplication issue, specifically with Joomla. Additionally, I have confirmed that in Google Webmasters, under URL parameters, the index.php parameter is set as 'Representative URL'.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandonEML0 -
Why is page still indexing?
Hi all, I have a few pages that - despite having a robots meta tag and no follow, no index, they are showing up in Google SERPs. In troubleshooting this with my team, it was brought up that another page could be linking to these pages and causing this. Is that plausible? How could I confirm that? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SSFCU
Sarah0 -
Product pages content
Hi! I'm doing some SEO work for a new client. I've been tasked with boosting some of their products, such as http://www.lawnmowersdirect.co.uk/product/self-propelled-rear-roller-rotary-petrol-lawnmowers/honda-hrx426qx. It's currently #48 for the term Honda Izy HRG465SD, while http://www.justlawnmowers.co.uk/lawnmowers/honda-izy-hrg-465-sd.htm is #2, behind Amazon. Regarding links, there's no great shakes between the pages or even the domains. However, there's major difference in content. I'm happy to completely revamp it, I just wanted to check I'm not missing anything out before starting to rewrite it altogether! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
To index search results or not?
In its webmaster guidelines, Google says not to index search results " that don't add much value for users coming from search engines." I've noticed several big brands index search results, and am wondering if it is generally OK to index search results with high engagement metrics (high PVPV, time on site, etc). We have an database of content, and it seems one of the best ways to get this content in search engines would be to allow indexing of search results (to capture the long tail) rather than build thousands of static URLs. Have any smaller brands had success with allowing indexing of search results? Any best practices or recommendations?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Load balancing - duplicate content?
Our site switches between www1 and www2 depending on the server load, so (the way I understand it at least) we have two versions of the site. My question is whether the search engines will consider this as duplicate content, and if so, what sort of impact can this have on our SEO efforts? I don't think we've been penalised, (we're still ranking) but our rankings probably aren't as strong as they should be. The SERPs show a mixture of www1 and www2 content when I do a branded search. Also, when I try to use any SEO tools that involve a site crawl I usually encounter problems. Any help is much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHillfd0