Sure, content is king but when you have a site chocked full of thousands upon thousands of pages of content, can it be too much?
Does too much content dilute the powerful incoming links which you have earned into miniscule citations? Or is this a navigation issue?
John Scott has an interesting case study of how removing non-performing content can supercharge your existing material and lead to increased search engine referrals :
About a month or so ago, I committed myself, removed pages from v7n that were xxx number of days old, had less than xxx number of page views, and less than xxx number of responses. Just to be sure that I didn’t remove any worthwhile discussions, I went through the list and checked anything that might be remotely worthwhile.
And I did not delete the threads - I simply moved them to a private, hidden, admin-access-only forum.
Within a couple weeks, I started to see the remaining pages performing much better. Within two weeks, search engine referrals were up 7,000 per day.
John’s theory?
- Adding non-performing content to a website will actually hurt your search engine visibility
- Non-performing content diluties and wastes link weight on non-performing pages.
- By removing tens of thousands of non-performing pages, you conserve and direct that link weight and focus it on performing pages
- Doing so increases the ranking of performing pages in SERPs.
More at Excess pages polluting your website?
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Comments
10 responses so far ↓
Michael Martinez on Apr 23, 2007 at 1:03 pm
John should know better than to draw sweeping conclusions on the basis of limited information.
He has no way of knowing whether his referrals would have shot up in the same time frame from simply doing nothing. I often see such spikes in my own referrals as the search engines readjust their indexes. It’s no big deal.
There are four things that determine whether a page ranks or doesn’t rank in search results:
1) What you do with your pages
2) What other people do with their pages
3) What the search engines do with their data
4) What people search for
What happens if John puts all that content back up? Will he lose the traffic? If so, what happens if he again takes the content down?
That’s a far more reliable test than simply taking one action and assuming any change occurs as a direct result of that one action.
John Scott on Apr 23, 2007 at 6:17 pm
I don’t draw my conclusions based solely on those stats. A more detailed explanation:
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=49036&view=findpost&p=225970
jame kingsted - domain name expert on Apr 23, 2007 at 7:53 pm
That’s an interesting argument. I could see how that might be an issue. I don’t really know the number of visitors be for he tested it. Was it 3000 a day or was it more like 6500 visitors a day. I think he might have a point if you had 1000’s of pages and then you removed them this might help. Well it was a nice test and I think he might be on to something.
ToddW on Apr 24, 2007 at 1:55 am
It makes perfect sense… you can only split, dillute, pass around so much link juice before it just is to the point it’s not worth a lick. It makes sense to remove shitty pages to save-up that juice for other pages :)
Josh on Apr 24, 2007 at 2:08 am
Interesting experiment, but I would like to see more information about it — and see it repeated at least a few times on other sites.
Halfdeck on Apr 24, 2007 at 2:52 am
I agree with John, at least on a theoretical level.
Some people believe that since a minimum PageRank is assigned to each page, having thousands of pages increases the total PageRank of a site.
Right, but ignore IBLs for a second. Having too many pages drives the average PageRank/page lower. If those numbers go down too low, you start seeing pages drop off the main index and into the supplemental index.
Put simply, having alot of pages isn’t necessarily bad, but having alot of pages no one links to isnt good. So getting rid of unpopular urls and redirecting link juice to more important pages is a good tactic.
Ahmed Bilal on Apr 24, 2007 at 6:27 am
On the surface, the link weight argument holds its ground.
You can tie it in to usability if you feel like it, too :)
As HalfDeck says, having a lot of pages no one links to isnt good.
Actually - having a lot of pages no one BUT you links to isn’t good - it just dilutes your site’s rankings.
Michael Martinez on Apr 24, 2007 at 1:07 pm
I see nothing substantive in the thread you link to, John.
Your argument is equivalent to saying, “I washed my car today and it rained. Therefore, washing my car causes rain.”
It’s a nice myth, we all joke about it, but science has shown us that rainfall has nothing to do with washing cars.
If you want to prove that your search referrals improved so drastically because you removed that content, then follow these steps:
1) Put the content back
2) Let it get indexed
3) Mark your search referrals
4) Remove the content
5) Let it get deindexed
6) Mark your search referrals
If replacing the content coincides with a sudden drop in search referrals and then removing it a second time coincides with a second increase in search referrals, you’ve made a much better argument.
Until you do that, you’re just pairing up coincidental facts with no compelling reason to believe there is any cause-and-effect in play.
Rhea Drysdale on Apr 25, 2007 at 10:03 am
It’s interesting to see this post. I’m doing some tests right now on this very thing. We experienced negative results with the indexing of thousands of low PR pages, so let’s see what happens when we remove certain sections. :)
John Scott on Apr 25, 2007 at 9:06 pm
Michael,
No, my argument is the equivalent of saying that a page is going to perform better if it is linked to from a web page which has a lot of link weight, than if it is linked to from a page which has no link weight.
It isn’t the equivalent of that; that is precisely what I am saying.
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