More pages or less pages for best SEO practices?
-
Hi all,
I would like to know the community's opinion on this. A website with more pages or less pages will rank better? Websites with more pages have an advantage of more landing pages for targeted keywords. Less pages will have advantage of holding up page rank with limited pages which might impact in better ranking of pages. I know this is highly dependent. I mean to get answers for an ideal website.
Thanks,
-
I generally agree with George and Nicholas.
I also think that the strength of your site vs the strength of the competition is important - along with the difficulty of the keywords.
If you are going after long tail keywords against weaker competition, then six shorter content pages targeting six different keywords would be best. However, if the competition is strong and the keywords difficult then one big kickass page will have the best chance.
Finally, presenting one comprehensive article with all of your text and photos on one page is better for link-earning than breaking it up into six short pages.
This is a complex question asked simply. We could also consider the ad impression opportunity of getting the visitor to click through six pages.
-
Agree with George, quality over quantity is whats important. With that being said, the more pages you have the more keywords you can potentially target from your website, so while keeping the content quality high, you want to have a decent amount of pages that are each optimized for different keyword phrases that you want to rank for.
-
In my humble opinion I believe it is a matter of value. I believe that a 3000-word page targeting 6 keywords has (and is perceived by google as having) more value or than 6 pages with 500 words each.
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
-
Ctr question with home page and product pages
do you believe that the advantage of targeting a search term on the home page is now worse off than before? as I understand it ctr is a big factor now And as far as i can see if two pages are equal on page etc the better ctr will win out, the issue with the home page is the serp stars cannot be used hence the ctr on a product page will be higher? I feel if you where able to get a home page up quicker (1 year instead of two) you still lost out in the end due to the product page winning on ctr? do you think this is correct?
Algorithm Updates | | BobAnderson0 -
Are SEO Friendly URLS Less Important Now That Google Is Indexing Breadcrumb Markup?
Hi Moz Community and staffers, Would appreciate your thoughts on the following question: **Are SEO friendly URLS less important now that Google is indexing breadcrumb markup in both desktop and mobile search? ** Background that inspired the question: Our ecommerce platform's out of the box functionality has very limited "friendly url" settings and would need some development work to setup an alias for more friendly URLS. Meanwhile, the breadcrumb markup is implemented correctly and indexed so it seems there's no longer an argument for improved CTR with SEO friendly URLS . With that said I'm having a hard time justifying the URL investment, as well as the 301 redirect mapping we would need to setup, and am wondering if more friendly URLs would lead to a significant increase in rankings for level of effort? Sidenote: We already rank well for non-brand and branded searches since we are brand manufacturer with an ecommerce presence. Our breadcrumbs are much cleaner & concise than our URL structure. Here are a couple examples. Category URL: http://www.mysite.com/browse/category1/subcat2/subcat3/_/N-7th
Algorithm Updates | | jessekanman
Breadcrumb: www.mysite.com > category1 > subcat2 > subcat3 Product URL: http://www.mysite.com/product/product-name/_/R-133456E112
Breadcrumb: www.mysite.com > category1 > subcat2 > subcat3 > product name The "categories" contain actual keywords just hiding them here in the example. According to my devs they can't get rid of the "_" but could possible replace it with a letter. Also they said it's an easier fix to make the URLs always lower case. Lastly some of our product URLS contain non-standard characters in the product name like "." and "," which is also a simpler fix according to my developers. Looking forward to your thoughts on the topic! Jesse0 -
Why Is The Wrong Page Ranking?
In the past two weeks, I've seen some movement in ranking for "Tampa Personal Injury Attorney." The problem is that this page: http://www.kempruge.com/personal-injury/ is the one that's ranking and not this page: http://www.kempruge.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-legal-attorneys/ which is the one I've been working on. Also, the former page has made it to page 4 (not great) but better than 7, which is what the latter page was. In addition, the latter page now doesn't rank at all (or at least not in the first 16 pages). Finally, according to Moz, the latter page (the one that no longer ranks) is my second best page after my homepage. I just don't understand this at all. Is this a fluke? Should I just try to work on the page that's ranking higher over the page I've put the time into? Thanks, Ruben
Algorithm Updates | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Using a stop word when optimizing pages
I have a page (for a spa) I am trying to fully optimize and, using AdWords have run every conceivable configuration (using Exact Match) to ascertain the optimal phrase to use. Unfortunately, the term which has come up as the 'best' phrase is "spas in XXX" [xxx represents a location]. When reviewing the data, phrases such as "spas XXX" or "spa XXX" doesn't give me an appropriate search volume to warrant optimizing. So, with that said, do I optimize the page without the word "in", and 'hope' we get the search volume for searches using the word "in", or optimize using the stop word? Any thoughts? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | MarketingAgencyFlorida0 -
Large number of thin content pages indexed, affect overall site performance?
Hello Community, Question on negative impact of many virtually identical calendar pages indexed. We have a site that is a b2b software product. There are about 150 product-related pages, and another 1,200 or so short articles on industry related topics. In addition, we recently (~4 months ago) had Google index a large number of calendar pages used for webinar schedules. This boosted the indexed pages number shown in Webmaster tools to about 54,000. Since then, we "no-followed" the links on the calendar pages that allow you to view future months, and added "no-index" meta tags to all future month pages (beyond 6 months out). Our number of pages indexed value seems to be dropping, and is now down to 26,000. When you look at Google's report showing pages appearing in response to search queries, a more normal 890 pages appear. Very few calendar pages show up in this report. So, the question that has been raised is: Does a large number of pages in a search index with very thin content (basically blank calendar months) hurt the overall site? One person at the company said that because Panda/Penguin targeted thin-content sites that these pages would cause the performance of this site to drop as well. Thanks for your feedback. Chris
Algorithm Updates | | cogbox0 -
When was the last algorithm update? One of my pages has dropped significantly this week
One of my pages dropped 22 places last week and I'm not sure why - can any body give me some suggestions to why this might have happened?
Algorithm Updates | | lindsayjhopkins0 -
How vital is it for a site to have a mobile site for mobile SEO?
With the exponential growth in mobile device sales and usage and an expected 980% growth in advertising next year for/on mobile devices, we at http://www.mobilewebsitegurus.com decided that it was time to help companies create great looking mobile websites that are user friendly and SEO friendly at affordable rates with tons of features built in from the start. However, when selling our design, how important is it to have a GOOD mobile site compared to a big one to rank on mobile devices? We head that Google was thinking of only showing mobile sites on mobile devices. NOT TRUE. Then we read/heard that the rankings were MUCH BETTER if you had a mobile site, but after a lot of research we found that too NOT to be true. On most sites there were NO difference. So what is the TRUTH about this and is it maybe just that it will happen, just has not happened yet - the different rankings for mobile and regular sites on mobile devices that is? ANY insight in this would be great not only for us but for the entire SEO community 🙂 Thanks. ALSO, add "Mobile SEO" to the boxes below of "Topics" since mobile SEO will grow in importance.
Algorithm Updates | | yvonneq0 -
SEO Test: Domain Hyphenation [Update]
In May I announced test results for domain hyphenation but after a 3 month followup the results have changed and the hyphenated domain now wins on what seems to be the first link instance advantage. I was unable to discover any other factors which may have influenced this test but if anyone has any ideas I would like to hear about it. Here are the details of the SEO test and revealed URLs.
Algorithm Updates | | Dan-Petrovic1