Decreasing the size of a site to increase SEO value of remaining pages?
-
My website has thousands of pages and I have so many keywords on the bottom of page 1 and on page 2 of SERPs. I am considering making the site smaller to lessen the dilution of the overall domain authority and in theory the remainder pages should get pushed up in rank. Do you feel this theory is flawed? Is it better to 301 or remove the pages if they don't have backlinks directly to the internal page? These are pages I would re-enable down the road once overall domain authority is increased.
thanks,
David
-
No i would not remove pages,
How pagerank works is in simple terms, image that every page is awarded 1 point, you have 3 pages your site has 3 points, you add 3 more pages , your site has 6 points, but divided by 6 pages, back to where you started. but by internal linking you can pust that 6 points onto one page, you may end up with 1 page with 3 points and 5 pages with 0.5.
What i would do, is chose a page you want to rank for a subject, term, keyword. then all other pages that have relevance i would link to this page.
I once again suggest reading this page
-
If your site covers a specific topic, then by removing off-topic discussions you can keep your site more relevant to your primary focus which can benefit your search results.
In your case, I believe your approach is not in the best interests of your site. I drew that conclusion based on your last statement "These are pages I would re-enable down the road once overall domain authority is increased."
Based on the little information shared, I am guessing the site you are referring to is http://www.couponcactus.com/. I only took a brief look at your site but the pages all seem to be coupons which are relevant to your site.
You could remove coupons which are no longer valid. Doing such will help users and search engines. It will avoid users coming to your site seeking a deal only to be frustrated to find the offer is not valid and then bouncing off your site. Your metrics such as bounce rate can improve as well which can benefit your ranking.
There are many opportunities for you to improve your DA which provide long term value rather then attempting this temporary change which is unlikely to yield any noticeable benefit. If I was responsible for your site, a few changes to consider would be:
-
add Google+ to your site
-
add the ability to use social logins to sign in to your site
-
add more categories. I recently was looking for a Verisign SSL certificate for a client. I located a 25% off coupon on a site similar to yours. I don't see any category such a coupon would fit into. Perhaps I missed it.
-
continue to expand your coupon selection. What offers do competitors have that your site does not?
-
check out every competitors site and upgrade yours until you are confident CouponCactus is the best coupon site on the planet.
-
once the above is done, let the world know about your site. Any time a forum thread or blog article talks about a product or service which you offer a coupon for, make a helpful reply letting interested people know "hey, if you do like Kim Kardashian items you can get 20% off with the coupon at couponcactus.com."
-
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
-
How to deal with Pages not present anymore in the site
Hi, we need to cut out from the catalog some destinations for our tour operator, so basically we need to deal with destination pages and tour pages not present anymore on the site. What do you think is the best approach to deal with this pages to not loose ranking? Do you think is a good approach to redirect with 301's these pages to the home page or to the general catalog page or do you suggest another approach? tx for your help!
Technical SEO | | Dreamrealemedia0 -
Home Page Ranking Instead of Service Pages
Hi everyone! I've noticed that many of our clients have pages addressing specific queries related to specific services on their websites, but that the Home Page is increasingly showing as the "ranking" page. For example, a plastic surgeon we work with has a page specifically talking about his breast augmentation procedure for Miami, FL but instead of THAT page showing in the search results, Google is using his home page. Noticing this across the board. Any insights? Should we still be optimizing these specific service pages? Should I be spending time trying to make sure Google ranks the page specifically addressing that query because it SHOULD perform better? Thanks for the help. Confused SEO :/, Ricky Shockley
Technical SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
How to Let Google Know I am a new Site Owner and to Remove or De-value all backlinks?
I am looking to buy a new domain for a brand. Problem is the domain has was registered in 1996 and has around 6k backlinks (according to ahrefs) that I need removed as the old content will have no relevance to my new site. Should I just disavow all of them? Is there anything "special" I can do to let Google know that it will be new site owner/content and to remove/discount the current links?
Technical SEO | | RichardSEO0 -
Removing images from site and Image Sitemap SEO advice
Hello again, I have received an update request where they want me to remove images from this site (as of now its a bunch of thumbnails) current page design: http://1stimpressions.com/portfolio/car-wraps/ and turn it into a new design which utilized a slider (such as this): http://1stimpressions.com/portfolio/ They don't want the thumbnails on the page anymore. My question is since my site has a image sitemap that has been indexed will removing all the images hurt my SEO greatly? What would the recommended steps to take to reduce any SEO damage be, if so? Thank you again for your help, always great and very helpful feedback! 🙂 cheers!
Technical SEO | | allstatetransmission0 -
50,000 pages or a page with parameters
I have a site with about 12k pages on a topic... each of these pages could use another several pages to go into deeper detail about the topic. So, I am wondering, for SEO purposes would it be better to have something like 50,000 new pages for each sub topic or have one page that I would pass parameters to and the page would be built on the fly in code behind. The drawback to the one page with parameters is that the URL would be static but the effort to implement would be minimal. I am also not sure how google would index a single page with parameters. The drawback to the 50k pages model is the dev effort and possibly committed some faux pas by unleashing so many links to my internal pages. I might also have to mix aspx with html because my project can't be that large. Anyone here ever have this sort of choice to make? Is there a third way I am not considering?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Same Video on Multiple Pages and Sites... Duplicate Issues?
We're rolling out quite a bit of pro video and hosting on a 3-party platform/player (likely BrightCove) that also allows us to have the URL reside on our domain. Here is a scenario for a particular video asset: A. It's on a product page that the video is relevant for. B. We have an entry on our blog with the video C. We have a separate section of our site "Video Library" that provides a centralized view of all videos. It's there too. D. We eventually give the video to other sites (bloggers, industry educational sites etc) for outreach and link-building. A through C on our domain are all for user experience as every page is very relevant, but are there any duplicate video issues here? We would likely only have the transcript on the product page (though we're open to suggestions). Any related feedback would be appreciated. We want to make this scalable and done properly from the beginning (will be rolling out 1000+ videos in 2010)
Technical SEO | | SEOPA0 -
Page rank 2 for home page, 3 for service pages
Hey guys, I have noticed with one of our new sites, the home page is showing page rank two, whereas 2 of the internal service pages are showing as 3. I have checked with both open site explorer and yahoo back links and there are by far more links to the home page. All quality and relevant directory submissions and blog comments. The site is only 4 months old, I wonder if anyone can shed any light on the fact 2 of the lesser linked pages are showing higher PR? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nextman0 -
Are (ultra) flat site structures better for SEO?
Noticed that a high-profile site uses a very flat structure for there content. It essentially places most landing pages right under the root domain folder. So a more conventional site might use this structure: www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/ www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/landing-page-2/ www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/landing-page-2/landing-page-3/ This site in question - a successful one - would deploy the same content like this: www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/ www.widgets.com/landing-page-2/ www.widgets.com/landing-page-3/ So when you're clicking deeper into the nav. options the clicks always roll up to the "top level." Top level pages are given more weight by SEs but conventional directory structures are also beneficial seen as ideal. Why would a site take the plunge and organize content in this way? What was the clincher?
Technical SEO | | DisneyFamily1