How long should my website content be (max and min number of words)?
-
I saw a web site which has been number 1 on Google for a long time, and the home page has 5700 words, but the results show it is not spam, so what would be the recommended word number for a home page?
-
There is no set word count that will help rank. It is the quality and depth of the content you are providing. Keep the searches intent in mind when developing content. Be engaging and educational, answering the searchers query. i have pages on my website that rank with as little as 300 words and as much as a1000. so as you see its not the word count. its the quality.
Thanks,
Don Silvernail
-
There really isn't a right and wrong answer to this, but I will say that the content has to be long enough to answer the question that the page is answering.
In some circumstances, this might mean a short page with just 200 words - other times it might be more. 5000+ sounds a bit insane and like they are trying to over optimise, in which case would make me wonder about the phrase itself - is it low search volume?
There are so many variables that come into play with ranking pages that it would be impossible to say with any degree of certainty what is going on without actually seeing it.
From a usability view, this also sounds very excessive.
Make your pages clear and straight to the point without any waffle - and with 5000+ words, I would be surprised if all of that was really needed.
-Andy
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
-
Website server errors
I launched a new website at www.cheaptubes.com and had recovered my search engine rankings as well after penguin & panda devestation. I'm was continuing to improve the site Sept 26th by adding caching of images and W3 cache but moz analytics is now saying I went from 288 medium issues to over 600 and i see the warning "45% of site pages served 302 redirects during the last crawl". I'm not sure how to fix this? I'm on WP using Yoast SEO so all the 301's I did are 301's not 302's. I do have SSL, could it be Http vs Https? I've asked this question before and two very nice people replied with suggestions which I tried to implement but couldn't, i got the WP white screen of death several times. They suggested the code below. Does anyone know how to implement this code or some other way to reduce the errors I'm getting? I've asked this at stackoverflow with no responses. "you have a lot of http & https issues so you should fix these with a bit of .htaccess code, as below. RewriteEngine On
On-Page Optimization | | cheaptubes
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^.*$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L] You also have some non-www to www issues. You can fix these in .htaccess at the same time... RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L] You should find this fixes a lot of your issues. Also check in your Wordpress general settings that the site is set to www.cheaptubes.com for both instances." When I tried to do as they suggested it gave me an internal server error. Please see the code below from .htaccess and the server error. I took it out for now. BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on RewriteRule ^.$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@cheaptubes.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.0 -
Duplicate content issues - page content and store URLs
Hi, I'm experiencing some heavy duplicate content Crawl errors on Moz with www.redrockdecals.com and therefore I really need some help. It brings up different connections between products and I'm having a hard time figuring out what it means. It is listing the same products as duplicate content but they have different URL endings. For example:http://www.redrockdecals.com/car-graphics/chevrolet-silverado?___store=nl&___from_store=us
On-Page Optimization | | speedbird1229
&
http://www.redrockdecals.com/car-graphics/chevrolet-silverado?___store=d&___from_store=us It seems like Moz considers the copy-pasted parts in the Full Description (scrolled a bit down on product pages) as Duplicate Content. For example the general text found on this page: http://www.redrockdecals.com/caution-tow-limited-turning-radius-decal Or this page: http://www.redrockdecals.com/if-you-don-t-succeed-first-time-then-skydiving-isn-t-for-you-bumper-sticker I am planning to write new and unique descriptions for all products but what do you suggest - should I either remove the long same descriptions or just shorten them perhaps so they don't outweigh the short but unique descriptions above? I've heard search engines understand that some parts of the page can be same on other pages but I wonder if in my case this has gone too deep... Thanks so much!0 -
Duplicate and thin content - advanced..
Hi Guys Two issues to sort out.. So we have a website that lists products and has many pages for: a) The list pages - that lists all the products for that area.
On-Page Optimization | | nick-name123
b) The detailed pages - that when click into from the list page, will list the specific product in full. On the list page, we perhaps have half the description written down, when clicked into you see the full description.
If you search in google for a phrase on the detailed page, you will see results for that specific page including 'multiple' list pages where it is on. For example, lets say we are promoting 'trees' which are situated in Manhatten. And we are also promoting trees in Brooklyn, there is a crossover. So a tree listed in Manhatten will also be listen in brooklyn as its close by (not from America so don't laugh if I have areas muddled)
We then have quite a few pages with the same content as a result. I read a post a while back from the mighty Cutts who said not to worry about the duplicate unless its spammy, but what is good for one person, is spammy to another.. Does anyone have any ideas as to if this is a genuine problem and how you would solve? Also, we know we have alot of thin content on the site, but we dont know how to identify it. It's a large site so needs something automated (I think).. Thanks in advance Nick0 -
Tool To Search For Duplicate Content
Hi Is there such a tool that can be use to search a website for duplicate content? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Bossandy0 -
Usability-question on 2 of my websites
Hi all, It has been a while since I have been in this forum, but that's normally a great sign 🙂 Anyway these days I'm work on a "face-lift" on a couple of my sites (www.krydsord.dk, www.bingoforum.dk and www.alutagrender.dk), but also this face-lift should be more than just that. Hopefully it will help the usability to be better, and as a result of that - I hope it will make it easier for my visitors to easily find what they are looking for. The question is: I would like to ad, say, 25 words of description (mouse-over) in my top menu buttons. Why? Because, I believe that it's a possible problem that the menu just says "krydsord" (crosswords) in stead of a describing text saying something about "Push this button and you will see a complete list of all the cross words on Krydsord.dk). This way, I get the chance to add more text (for the Search Engines) and to guide my visitors in a way that I'm not capable of with the limitations my top menus give me as they are at this moment. Naturally, my visitors should be able to easily decline this "extra information", once they have got it once. Is this completely way off, or do you like the idea? More specifically: Will this be annoying for the visitors, will it have any positive effect on SEO matters? Actually I got partly inspired during a SEOmoz webinar (http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/designing-for-seo), even though it's not exactly what they are talking about in thwe webinar. For anybody who are curious (or just need to kill some time), you can have a look from 19:00 and watch it for about two minutes. Thanks a lot! Nicolai
On-Page Optimization | | MPO0 -
Duplicate content in the title
Good morning, I am developing an application that searches offers in the press. The problem I have is the follow one:
On-Page Optimization | | ofuente
When I find an offer that I have already post, I cant use the same URL because it generates duplicate content , as the URL is generated from the title. If I find two offers in different stores (for example Thomson TV) I am studying two options. The first would be to add a number at the end of the URL
http://www.offertazo.com/televisor-thomson
http://www.offertazo.com/televisor-thomson1
http://www.offertazo.com/televisor-thomson2 Another option I propose would be to add semantic data to provide value (such as the date). For example:
http://www.offertazo.com/01-12-12/televisor-thomson I appreciate your help.0 -
Website title question
Say you have a website url of a rather competitive keyword phrase, would it be beneficial for me to go ahead and name my site title the same as the url? And also should my site title go through every page, or should i consider having slight variations throughout the pages? for example: page title | site title or page title| slight varation of title on sub page? **edit - to further expand on the question a bit also, if my google places has the company name on _there - would it be effective to go ahead and use the company name in my site title? _ _Also if i have the main keyword in the breadcrumb as the home, does that effect my SEO credibility if it shows up on all the pages? _
On-Page Optimization | | tgr0ss0 -
How to SEO a website that is being help back by duplicate content?
We have over 20 websites that sell property. Each website is targeted to a different country. People advertise to sell their property. The websites are not getting to page 1 for the terms we want probably because of duplication issues. If we compare one website with another country website on www.duplicatecontent.net we find it is nearly 70% between one and the other. So we trying to understand why this is. If someone wanted to sell a property in Spain we would create an advert for them but rather than putting this on the back-end of the Spain website it goes on a separate website that does on all countries. We have tried to put nofollow tags so that the country specific website gets acknowledgement of being the original website but the rankings for key-terms will not rise and the duplication % remains nearly 70%. Can anyone suggest the best way forward?
On-Page Optimization | | Feily0