How much is too much content for a home-page?
-
Hey guys,
I'm looking to implement a strategy where I put a 20,000 word article on my home-page. It won't be a super-long page, this content will be divided into nested tabs.
The content will also be found on individual pages (corresponding to the tabs) on the site, but these will have a canonical tag pointing to the home page,
Will I get penalized for this kind of structure?
Cheers,
JC
-
Bing has just bloged about missused conanoicals will be ignored, I would not do what you suggest, if the algorithm does not pick it up, a manual look at your site would i think be seen as spam.
-
Hi JC
I was always taught that having 200-400 words on a page is what to aim for. But, in my quest over the years to test pages, I also found that an article page containing a 1000 words is OK. There was a test done some years ago, I can't remember by who, but this person tested the pages with the major search engines and out of the big 3 Bing was quite happy handling a 1000 word page but his stats showed differing results from Google and Yahoo. (If anyone can remember that test please comment as I am sure it was a Moz person??).
Another test I conducted was using tabs on a HOME page. I had in place about 7 tabs with content broken down into each tab. Prior to putting these in place the page only had 1 tab and around 300-400 words.
After adding in the other tabs, the page disappeared off page 1 SERPS for terms it had previously ranked for. At the time it was unknown what the issue was, so I had to go through a process to find out. The page had a reasonable number of inbound links pointing at it, so I did not increase those, and for about 8 to 10 weeks of tweaking and fine tuning I finally took the decision to revert the page back to what it had been i.e. 300-400 words of content and 1 tab. Wallah the page within 24 hours returned to ranking for the terms it had previously. My next experiment was to break my content down into 2 tabs and my page remained ranking.
After further tests I would conclude that too many tabs was the issue and in my opinion Google was penalising my page because it would look like I was 'hiding' text on the page in amongst these tabs.
I still believe Google likes big websites, Wikipedia is testimony to that, and look at how all the subject matter is broken down in that site. Therefore my suggestion to you would be to review your content, how many 'themes' and 'topics' are there within it, and break it down into specific pages of around 300-400 words with a few relevant links between the pages. I believe this will work much better for you.
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
-
Content Strategy/Duplicate Content Issue, rel=canonical question
Hi Mozzers: We have a client who regularly pays to have high-quality content produced for their company blog. When I say 'high quality' I mean 1000 - 2000 word posts written to a technical audience by a lawyer. We recently found out that, prior to the content going on their blog, they're shipping it off to two syndication sites, both of which slap rel=canonical on them. By the time the content makes it to the blog, it has probably appeared in two other places. What are some thoughts about how 'awful' a practice this is? Of course, I'm arguing to them that the ranking of the content on their blog is bound to be suffering and that, at least, they should post to their own site first and, if at all, only post to other sites several weeks out. Does anyone have deeper thinking about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Redirecting homepage to internal page (2nd Tier page)
We are planning to experiment redirecting our homepage to one of the 2nd tier page. I mean....example.com to example.com/page. We need this page to rank well, but it doesn't have much internal links or external back-links, so we opt for this redirect. Advantage with this page is, it has "keyword" we want to rank for in URL. "page" in example.com/page. Will this help or hurt us in SEO? I think we are missing keyword in our root domain, so interested to highlight this page. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How to optimize count of interlinking by increasing Interlinking count of chosen landing pages and decreasing for less important pages within the site?
We have taken out our interlinking counts (Only Internal Links and not Outbound Links) through Google WebMaster tool and discovered that the count of interlinking of our most significant pages are less as compared to of less significant pages. Our objective is to reverse the existing behavior by increasing Interlinking count of important pages and reduce the count for less important pages so that maximum link juice could be transferred to right pages thereby increasing SEO traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Do I use H1 tag for logo or page content?
Should the h1 tag be used for the main page content or the logo? I understand the original method was too H1 the logo with the main search term, does this still hold true or should it be content focused?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Content with Read More..?
How does google see content that's static on page & content that has a "see more" or "read more" tag. Where the content collapses & de-collapses on a mouse click. On a condition that the complete is readable via the source code view as well as crawl-able by spiders?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Possible to Improve Domain Authority By Improving Content on Low Page Rank Pages?
My sites domain authority is only 23. The home page has a page authority of 32. My site consists of about 400 pages. The topic of the site is commercial real estate (I am a real estate broker). A number of the sites we compete against have a domain authority of 30-40. Would our overall domain authority improved if we re-wrote the content for several hundred of pages that had the lowest page authority (say 12-15)? Is the overall domain authority derived by an average of the page authority of each page on a domain? Alternatively could we increase domain authority by setting the pages with the lowest page authority to "no index". By the way our domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
What to do when you buy a Website without it's content which has a few thousand pages indexed?
I am currently considering buying a Website because I would like to use the domain name to build my project on. Currently that domain is in use and that site has a few thousand pages indexed and around 30 Root domains linking to it (mostly to the home page). The topic of the site is not related to what I am planing to use it for. If there is no other way, I can live with losing the link juice that the site is getting at the moment, however, I want to prevent Google from thinking that I am trying to use the power for another, non related topic and therefore run the risk of getting penalized. Are there any Google guidelines or best practices for such a case?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeAir0 -
Optimize the category page or a content page?
Hi, We wish to start ranking on a specific keyword ("log house prices" in italian). We have two options on what pages we should optimize for this keyword: A long content page (1000+ words with images) Log houses category page, optimized for the keyword (we have 50+ houses on this page, together with a short price summary). I would think that we have better chances with ranking with option nr.2 , but then we can't use that page for ranking with a more short-tail keyword (like "log houses"). What would you suggest? Is there maybe a third option for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohanMattisson0