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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?
Yes.
We had a site with some image content pages that had not a lot of text. They ranked great for years. Then, BAM, rankings across the site dropped on a Panda update.
We added noindex/follow to these pages, redirected some that were obsolete and our rankings came back with the next update.
I think that you should just make one website and publish best possible content.
If you take all of the time you plan to spend building hotdog stand websites stuffed with links and tricky maneuvers and place that effort into quality content creation you might have a kickass site that performs well.
Just build what people want and will find useful. Don't try to fool Google.
I use these numbers in a different way.....
Before I consider a keyword I want to know if it has any traffic. If it has traffic then I am interested.
After that I go look at the SERPs. To receive worthwhile traffic you usually have to earn one of the top five positions. I want to see who holds those positions and what type of content I will need to produce to be competitive.
If I think that I can beat their content then I will attack no matter who holds those positions. However, if those positions are held by authority sites and creating highly competitive content is going to be too expensive or impossible then I will look for another keyword.
In my opinion your content creation abilities are more important of a metric than keyword difficulty. If you can create competitive content you should not fear competition because where there is competition there is also (usually) a lot of traffic and a lot of money changing hands. If you can get into the thick of that you will do OK.
Because the adwords ranking method is based upon total yield of the ads.... meaning that
(number of clicks) x (cost of clicks)
is an important part of the calculation, it is possible - even probable - that the second or third position could have ten times the CTR of the first ad.
The first ad could have a clickthrough rate of 1% and be bidding $10 per click.... and the second position ad could have a clickthrough rate of 10% and be bidding $0.99 per click.
Google has been treating sites with lots of page-to-page duplication this way for at least five or six years.
You get indexed, ranked and start getting traffic but when Google figures out that your site was made with a cookie cutter then most of your pages will be filtered from the SERPs.
In my opinion this is different from a penalty. It's simply not showing dupes in the SERPs.
I used to have a lot of autogenerated content. Entire sites with hundreds of thousands of pages dedicated to it. They were kickass for a few weeks to a few months and then tanked hard.
I found that autogenerated content (where it is mainly boiler plate or duplicated) is a continuous expense. (Get killed and replace it, get killed and replace it.)
However, genuine authorship can be an investment that might continue to pay after I am dead (I wouldn't say that if I was twenty years old because strong competitors are popping up in every niche... but since I am one of the older people posting here I can say that with a little more certainty.)
Yes, searches done from "the plex" are weighted thousands of times over in determining the instant results.
Everybody getting "weed" is in a green state.
Where are you searching from William?
OMG!
I just typed in... "best way to conserve"..... and the query was completed with "WEED" !
WTF?
Maybe they can tell you are in Starbucks and that I am in WV?
I would let those domains expire and buy beer with the savings.
Or, if I was in a more aggressive mood, spend the money on my content attack.
This is just personal opinion and kind of speculative... (you know there is a lot of "art" in SEO...
I think that the authority of your site or lack of authority will have a much greater impact upon the rankings of your individual pages than the number of links on your homepage or any other page for that matter.
So, I add as many links as I think will be valuable to my visitors.
I think that if you have a large info site, having a homepage like the Los Angeles Times will do more to entice your visitors to engage your site than a homepage that tries to funnel all of your PageRank into a few trophy pages. The fact that most nascent sites get almost all of their traffic from longtail queries supports this idea in my opinion.
Done in an enticing way, a lot of links to internal pages seems to engage more visitors, lead to more sales and bring in more traffic on all of the sites that I manage.
I want my visitors to say... "Wow! They have a lot of great stuff on this site."
I spend lots of time trying to give my visitors more relevant and attractive options and zero time trying to funnel pagerank by reducing on-page linkage.
Don't let an obsession with SEO squeeze the sex appeal out of your site.
(Don't follow this idea if your site is nothing but a bunch of crappy pages... either time to get busy or time to pack it in.... your days are numbered.)
how much stock do you give to the idea that if you can determine the common language for top rankers and then duplicate that language and density of common words that your website will then rank for that query you desire?
None. At least the way that it is worded.
I think that the more effective way to beat your competitors is to do something vastly superior instead of mimicking their methods.
When I write an article I want that article to cover....
The very basics of the topic
What I believe are the most important aspects of the topic that every person should know
A very broad survey of what everybody everywhere is searching for.
I think that #3 is the most important for ranking (and a superior goal than what than the LSI you described). To do this you should do keyword research and create content that covers as many of the major queries as possible - preferably as
in your content. That gives you a page that answers what everybody everywhere is asking for.
Creating on-page anchor text for the
Your Job: Set business goals and objectives for the company website. The jobs you listed (competitive analysis, link building and content marketing specifically) will be busy work unless you have goals and objectives. As the biz owner you understand what is going on throughout the biz but the employee might not.
Your Job: Hire SEO consultant if you are not expert SEO. When you recruit consultant, if that person does not try to learn about the details of your biz then you need a different consultant. Consultant will have costs but will keep your employee on an arrow-straight path, guide training and make sure that things advance your business and minimize ineffective work. Loss through ineffective work is a big risk. Consultant should reduce that if you hire a good one.
Your Job: Don't send a noob out to fight Goliath. Get the noob on a training program for strength and strategy. Noobs can make huge SEO mistakes. Also many experienced SEOs are noobs and don't know it.
Your Job: Instruct the employee about goals and objectives for the website. Develop a plan for reaching those goals. Involve consultant if you have one.
Employee: Get basic training from books, webinars, videos.
Employee: Start learning about the site using analytics. Where traffic comes from, what converts, what is ranking where. The more you know about your website the more effective you will be at improving it and promoting it. Most important. This will help you learn about the people who are using your site, how they do or don't engage it and if the site is serving a valuable purpose. This is a source of benchmark data.
Your Job with Employee: Review analytics data and see where it meets / does not meet biz objectives. Involve SEO consultant if you have hired one.
Employee: Start with on-page improvement based upon biz objectives. Make changes for improvement and keep very detailed records of what was changed, why changed, when changed. Watch for results and keep records.
Employee: Ask razor specific questions here at Q&A when needed.
Your Job with Employee: Develop a marketing plan for the site.
Employee: Start work on the tasks of the marketing plan with regular conferences with the SEO consultant.
Employee: Ask more razor specific questions here at Q&A when needed.
Your Job: Regular conference with employee and consultant to be sure that things are on track, get progress, recalibrate goals.
Thank you John! I'll remember to edit the links.
Awesome! Thank you Cyrus.
I didn't know that it would drop over time. Thanks!
Yep. I figured this, but will accept it. 
Yep. Will do this!
Publishing on "pages" or "posts" is not the consideration.
What is important is the quality of what you publish and how you organize your content and present it to your audience.
How are the rankings? If these sites are dominant or highly competitive in their target niches then I would not merge the domains.
And, if this person is competing in local markets then local search can be as important as organic rankings.... I don't think that separate domains are a huge handicap there.
And, in PPC the separate domains might be a small advantage.
Now, if this site was competing for organic rankings in national SERPs then I might be more inclined to merge the domains.
Almost every website has ads. So if you have house ads for your own products that are not slapping the visitor's face then it should not be a huge turn-off for visitors. At least you don't have the same stinky ads that you see on other sites.
Thank you, Streamline. Should be really easy here because we have .html pages.
We have a page on Domain A, an established and well-ranking website, that would be more appropriate on Domain B, a site that we launched about two years ago.
This page ranks well, pulls nice search traffic and has traffic from external links.
We would like to move the page and its traffic from Domain A to Domain B using a 301 redirect.
Have you ever done this or have you heard of how it has worked for someone else?
Thanks!
I have quite a few images that are being indexed for popular search terms and are getting clicks.
Nice work! Hooorah!
I tend to think they are hurting my "quality score" in organic Google rankings
Huh??
I would like to eliminate these images from the equation because I tend to think they are hurting my "quality score" in organic Google rankings.
I believe that any role that engagement has in your rankings is based upon specific keywords done separately for web search and for image search. I am willing to bet big money on that.... in fact I have been all of my money on that.
Most of my sites get more traffic from image search than from web search. They rank fine in websearch.
The fact that your images are being clicked a lot says that people are interested in them. Did you ever think that image search activity might help your websearch rankings? (I don't know that it does but just saying that I think it might. After all, great images are a big part of quality content.)
So the images that are ranking are coming up for a broad national type search. This has 0 value for the site.
Still cheerin'.
Some of these visitors are local and you said that you like seeing the images in local search.
Do you have any customers who are from a great distance? Maybe the images pulled them in!
If you are getting a lot of this traffic slap some pay-per-impression ads on these pages.
But what is best practice?
I can't tell you best practice but for me the practice that seems to be working is place several great, attractive, interesting, relevant images on every page.
Don't chop off your foot because you think that maybe, but don't know for sure, that perhaps, you might, possibly have a small piece of gum stuck to the sole of your shoe.
I know lots of designers who are adamant about their opinions.... but very few to none of them have done A/B testing to determine the impact of their designs on visitors, conversions or search engines.
Lots of redesigns tank when they go up. Traffic drops or conversions drop or rankings drop. Or a combination of these.
I am all ears to hear about case studies... but don't have a lot of faith in untested opinions.
I let my visitors inform me of how the design is working. They are the voice that counts.
My homepage looks like the homepage of the LATimes.com.
Tons of text.
Intentional.
Those tons of text pull in thousands long tail visitors.
So, if I removed all of that text and slapped up an image I would loose a lot of visitors, a lot of income and a lot of SEO benefit that those visitors produce through likes links tweets and shares.
Nobody is going to "bolt" anything onto my site. I would tell the designer... "This text is an essential part of the design... non negotiable. Use your creativity to make it look great."
Most of the releases are to announce upcoming projects or to announce a recent website launch for a client, less often we’re highlighting a service or special we want to promote.
These topics are ephemeral rather than evergreen.
Just saying what I would do.....
I would announce client sites in batches - one batch of several clients every couple of months.
I would make three or four great pieces of content that are best-on-the-web in your niche each month (posted on your own site) and send one press release to PRweb that announces all of them. People might say WOW... if anybody still reads PRWeb releases.
I think that this would focus your efforts on building great equity in your website and minimize your investment in topics of temporary interest and using PRWeb - which IMO is a low value service. Maybe share your release with a couple of bloggers in your niche.
I hope that my competitors all spend the next month registering hundreds of domains to host single pages.
I don't know what methods you are using but they are probably better than these competitors.
Keep up the good work.
If I would use the words "most" and "typically" in this context I would be meaning about 50.1%
That would leave about 49.9% "without equity" to word it kindly or "screwed" to word it more accurately....
....but after all they were renting from the start. They just didn't understand.
Let me know when you start.... I help with funding.
I got one of these PCI notices. It grabbed my attention... I was fooled for a moment but didn't click their link.
Weasels are getting smarter all of the time following Charles Darwin's theory.
What happens when you cancel?
That depends where the links are coming from.
If they are placing your links on a private network those links will be gone before your SEO goes home from the office and your site will start slipping in the SERPs over the following weeks.
If they have gotten you valid mentions on blogs and other websites the links are more likely to stay.
If you go into a contract with a new SEO or renew with this person. Find out exactly where the links are coming from and what the deal will be when you leave their service.
Here is the low-hanging fruit.
Tweet about your best post... share it on FB. Ask your mum to link to it from her FB and blog.
If it is really good content, one of them might share it along to their friends or post it to reddit or slashdot.
ha ha... they are Phishing for Robert Pfisher.
They should only catch suckers with a $75 renewal price.
If they were smart they would charge $7 and grab your CC data.
Since your sites dropped on April 24th and that was a penguin date it is possible that penguin problems are responsible.
However, duplicate content could have done it if all of your sites have a lot of duplication. Google does not want to show several sites with the same content in a SERP so they demote the sites with less authority - even if the content on them was copied from other sites.
Duplicate content can be solved by deindexing problem pages, rewriting them or deleting them.
Your site could have multiple problems. You might want to take the quiz at mytrafficdropped.com to see if that gives you a better understanding of the problem.
*** WARNING ***
If you click the "SERP" link below some of the sites listed have possible malware problems. Visiting them is not recommended.
If you ,look at this SERP you will see that you have a possible duplicate content problem. Also, a couple of the listings in this SERP have a potential malware problem.
Sites with malware problems are usually dropped from the SERPs and sites linking to them are often harmed.
Nice work! Hope you get back to the top quickly.
Nice work!
Move these up a little higher in the SERPs and you will be running your competitors out of town.
On the non-product pages you can place obvious house ads that show you have a product page where a purchase and full details can be found. Or you can place "add to cart" buttons on the other two pages.
To take full advantage of this each of your pages could be optimized for different variants of the keyword.
I don't get it why some people think this is a problem.
Cannibalization? Hell yes! You are ready to eat your competitor's lunch.
We switched some of our products from paragraph to bullet descriptions and our conversion rate has stayed about the same. However, it has reduced the number of questions that we receive about those products.
**What about shortening the title tag? **I would drop all of the CMS stuff. Just be sure that it does not change the URL of your page. Check the referral traffic to see if the CMS words are pulling any traffic if you have any doubts.
What about changing the image file names and adding alt tags when they are nonsense or garbage? If you change an image name you will lose all current image traffic for that image. If I had lots of traffic I would not change it. If the traffic was nil I would consider a change.
**What about adding a "finish" picture to the top? **I have no fear of adding that. None. It is huge upside if you have a great image.
**What about making these changes incrementally? **Do it if you enjoy farting around. I don't think it will make any difference at all.
My most important advice. If you are improving the page, keeping it relevant and are not changing the URL, title tag or optimization have no fear.
What am I missing?
A razor-sharp focus.
Image that you only have two arrows and are under attack. What will you shoot with them?
90% of the benefits will flow from 10% of the potential activities. Identify them.
Read these answers knowing that this is what I do and how I think. On lots of these answers I don't know what google does and what google prefers. I am betting on my gut rather than on something that somebody somewhere said sometime in the past which might be very different now. I only trust what a very small number of people say and realize that google changes their mind about lots of stuff that they said in the past and don't tell anybody anything.
Make sense? lol
Currently it's "How To: Build a Custom Ergonomic Computer Desk - Blog - Projects, Ideas, Inspiration, Kee Klamp, Fittings"
I'd say that is waaaayyyyy too long. I keep mine at about 62 characters or less. Without doing a detailed analysis of traffic that the page is currently pulling I would probably shorten to...
How To: Build a Custom Ergonomic Computer Desk
What about changing the image file names and adding alt tags when they are nonsense or garbage?
Lots of my pages get over half of their traffic from image search. I would not change the image file name or the alt attribute unless I thought that there was a significant upside.
These can be part of the optimization of the page.
I do replace images when I have something better or update a graph, map or photo. However, I always maintain the file name and alt attribute.
Sometimes content update requires images to be deleted and I do that with reluctance.
OMG!
My image tags look like this....
"keyword" is something simple... probably two or three absolutely relevant keywords that describe the image.
giving the files real names and putting them on my own CDN
All of my images are on the same server as the website, in the same folder as the article.... like this...
egolsite.com/article-name/image-name.jpg
Some people have told me to move my images to cloud hosting or a free service instead of my server but I don't want to make it look like I am not serving my own content. I don't know if that makes any difference at all but I gladly pay to transfer terrabytes of images per month to keep them on my own servers. If someone hotlinks one of my images does that help my domain's authority? I don't know... but I got 'em there where I can see what's happening.
But what if I wanted to add a nice "finish" picture to to the top? Would that cause any issues?
I assume you are talking about a nice big image at top of page that will make visitors salivate? If that is what you are talking about then I would say... do it by all means and do it often.
What about making these changes incrementally?
Don't fart around. Go for it.
I improve pages all of the time and have great results. Traffic always goes up and rankings often go up. (A drop is very very rare.)
Adding content to an existing page can significantly increase your longtail keyword traffic.
These are what I use as a guide
-- don't do anything that will change the title tag (unless you are targeting different keywords)
-- don't do anything that will change the onpage optimization (unless you are targeting different keywords)
-- don't change image file names or alt attributes
-- add as much new content as possible
-- revise existing content without fear
-- add additional images whenever you have them
I like this question....
Yes, I have seen it.... you can create this condition by smart title tag writing.
You are out-ranked by the publisher, who you will probably never beat, but you entice more clicks by shouting a kickass price in your title tag.
Your title tag shouts some great value proposition such as FREE Shipping, FAST delivery.
Your title tag is simply more sexy by use of the words... "Secret Method..... Kickass Results..... or..... Free BEER
We have just seen a constant decrease in hits over the last 12 month period. Anywhere between 50-1,000 hits per month in decrease (continuously).
This does not seem to be a penalty or any action that google is taking against you.
What it looks like to me is a competitor eating your lunch.
A competitor in your space is promoting his site to improve its rankings and publishing new content that competes with yours. The result is an increase in his traffic and rankings and a decrease in yours.
You diagnose this by knowing your competitors and watching for increases in content, links, pages or improved optimization.
The required response from you if you want to reverse this trend is a content development and site promotion effort that is superior to the competitor.
Other things could cause this. Those might be...
publication of duplicate content by you or by a competitor....
a loss of traffic or power from links....
thin content being devalued....
decline in the number of people searching for your keywords
I would go out to the SERPs to see if my content is being duplicated... and determine if some of the things on my site were duplicates (either from other sites or having very similar pages on my own site).
The required response here is solving the duplicate problem by rewriting, deindexing or DMCA actions.
You can also look at google trends to see if there is a search volume decrease in your niche.
There are 5 different keywords in the title of the index page alone. I am wondering if it OK to target 3 different keywords with the index page? Or, if I should cut it down to 1.
Wait!
Five, Three or One?
Before you change anything you have to look at current performance.
There are a few sites that have the ability to support five keywords in the title tag.... many more that can support three.... and one could very well be a wholesale retreat.
So, before you retreat from five to three be sure that you are not going to be damaging current traffic.
Remember that you said....
I just started working with a client that is ranking fairly well for a number of keywords with his index page.
It sounds like this site is doing fantastic. Don't retreat from what is working - unless you are moving to more profitable ground.
How are these converting?
SEO does not have hard and fast rules about the number of keywords that a page can attack. You attack as many as your power and your smarts and your competitive situation allow....
.... and keep in mind that some keywords are a lot more valuable than others.
I want to address this question from a couple of perspectives....
USERS: As Dana said... Users prefer single long pages. These long pages with lots of content, lots of subtopics and lots of images are impressive when a person lands on them. That immediately shows them the depth and richness of your content and they can quickly scan your subheadings to see what you have to offer. These will more readily produce likes, tweets, links, etc. when compared to broken pages.
SEO: I have experimented with long and multiple short pages. I get more traffic from long pages because of the diversity of words that they contain. This brings in LOTS more long tail traffic. And, if visitors are liking, tweeting and linking you might get more search traffic.
MONETIZATION: This is a downside if you are showing ads. You get fewer impressions and if there is a limit on the number of ads you can display per page your ad density will be lower and thus less income. However, if your traffic is higher from the increased long tail and better rankings then you might recover the lost impressions per visitor with more visitors.
I write articles for my products and don't care if they outrank my product pages. You can place house ads on your article pages that lead to a purchase page... you can also place buy buttons on an article page so that people can buy after your article inspires them.
Often my article page and product page take positions #1 and #2 in the SERPs..
If you have an article that inspires purchases you might sell more than people landing on a product page. And, if you can have strong calls to action on an article page it can generate lots of sales.
Lots of people buy football apparel at stadiums at very high prices. That is because they get a good feeling about football while watching the game. If your article can do that for your product then you might make some nice sales. The higher the value of the goods the stronger this relationship might be.
In lots of SERPs it is easier to compete with an article page than it is with a product page.
Whoops... I said... "getclicky.com" but meant "crazyegg.com".
Crazyegg specializes in heat maps.
GetClicky is an anyalytics site. (They just launched heatmaps but for now crazyegg's heat maps are much better in my opinion.)
I use both of these services every day.
What I'm wondering is that if i'm going to be penalized for having those three services that aren't necessarily related too closely on the same page as opposed to having the one page for each service (like we have now).
I don't think that you will be penalized.
If I was considering this for my site I would list all three (design, video, marketing) in the navigation as that would display all of these services for all visitors to see. I would not take the chance of someone looking for video not seeing it because the link is missing.
So, until I had so many services that it is difficult to list them all visibly, I would include them in the main navigation.
This is probably something that is easy to test with a program like getclicky.com. Toss the site up with the services listed and see how many people click it. Then toss it up with a single services link and see what happens.
I am willing to bet that lots more people look at your services if you have all of them listed in the nav.
Good luck.
Write three articles that answer the most -frequently-asked questions in my industry - and do a kickass job on them..
Just sayin' what I would do.... others will certainly have a different approach....
My traffic has grown from 0 to anywhere from 80 to 160 visitors every day in just 3 months,
Kickass... Nice work....
I also have a large twitter following + a twitter tribe that shares all of my blog posts.
Great asset. You are pulling in traffic and your posts are being shared.
If you have been putting up 15 posts per month and after three months are getting 80 to 160 visitors per day, I think that is pretty good.
If there are still tons of topics that you can create content about I would keep putting them up. Every new one will compete for new keywords and pull in new traffic.
I would make it very easy for people to share your posts using a service like AddThis....
If your posts are pulling traffic and getting shared it is very possible that the value of putting more time into creating more posts will pull in more traffic than time spent linkbuilding.
That's how I would look at it. Before making a final decision I would evaluate where the traffic is coming from, what it is doing after landing on the site. If your content is producing valuable traffic I would produce more of it. Links will arrive on their own if your content can product steady traffic growth. While they arrive you are creating assets for your site.
