12 replies to this topic

[fabrizio]

Hello here.

I have an important question for you guys. My website (a commercial website) has been thriving very well for about 10 years with something like 1,500 item pages indexed on Google until 5 months ago when we gradually begun to add new items (as well corresponding webpages) until today having more than 70,000 pages indexed on Google.

The fact is: traffic is NOT changed at all. Despite now we have over 70,000 indexed pages on Google, traffic is still the same as 5 months ago (or one year ago during this time). How that can be possible? We expected that having more pages indexed on Google, targeting more keywords, would have brought us more traffic, instead that doesn't seem to be the case. Same issue on Yahoo! and Bing: same traffic as 5 months ago.

Looks to me that no matter how many pages you have indexed, your site get always the same "total" amount of traffic, just distributed on more pages.

Is that really the case? How do you explain that otherwise?

Please, note that the Panda Update hit me back in February, before we released the new item/pages, but we recovered enough to be almost back on track, so I wouldn't take it into consideration.

Any thoughts are very welcome.

Thank you in advance for any insights!

Sincerely,
Fabrizio Ferrari

Edited by qwerty, 30 July 2011 - 10:51 AM.

[qwerty]

Having more pages that are optimized for different keywords gives you increased opportunity for traffic. It doesn't necessarily mean more traffic, though, since it depends on how popular and how competitive those new keywords are.

Just to clarify, when you say you're getting the same amount of traffic, do you mean that the same number of visitors are coming to the site from organic searches, or that you're getting the same number of page views? Or both? And what about conversions -- are they up or down? There are a lot of possible explanations, but without a clear picture of the situation they're all just guesses. Maybe the pages you had before were fairly general, so now people are landing on pages that more specifically reflect what they're looking for. Maybe you've overcomplicated the site in the process of expanding it, so people can no longer find what they're looking for.

[Michael Martinez]

Please, note that the Panda Update hit me back in February, before we released the new item/pages, but we recovered enough to be almost back on track, so I wouldn't take it into consideration.

But you MUST take these kinds of things into consideration.

Based on your explanation of the site's history, you had X amount of traffic from 1500 pages. Then Panda struck and your traffic went down to X-Panda. Since then you have added almost 70,000 pages and that has brought your traffic back to almost-X.

If that is in fact the way things have gone, you cannot ignore Panda -- you have to either do something about your site design or hope that the next training set expansion pulls you out of the downgrade category -- or the one after that.

Eventually, if your site doesn't come back, you WILL have to change it or change SOMETHING.

[fabrizio]

Having more pages that are optimized for different keywords gives you increased opportunity for traffic. It doesn't necessarily mean more traffic, though, since it depends on how popular and how competitive those new keywords are.

Just to clarify, when you say you're getting the same amount of traffic, do you mean that the same number of visitors are coming to the site from organic searches, or that you're getting the same number of page views? Or both? And what about conversions -- are they up or down? There are a lot of possible explanations, but without a clear picture of the situation they're all just guesses. Maybe the pages you had before were fairly general, so now people are landing on pages that more specifically reflect what they're looking for. Maybe you've overcomplicated the site in the process of expanding it, so people can no longer find what they're looking for.

We are getting around the same amount of unique visitors and page views. Conversion rate didn't change, still around 1%.

Is the no change in traffic that concerns me. Why am I getting the same traffic as we had 1,500 pages now that we have over 70,000 indexed? And we are not buried over the 4-5th pages on Google... I mean, we mostly on the first page for those page/keywords!

Try the following, just picked random right now from our newest added pages, we are listed as virtualsheetmusic.com:

A Baby In The Cradle sheet music
Baby Just Like You sheet music
no family man sheet music


So, I am wondering, how we couldn't register any increase in traffic? Even if a few people a day would search for those keywords, we have anyway added 70,000 new pages to our site, that should mean something. All of the indexed via sitemaps (and confirmed via Webmaster Tools).

But you MUST take these kinds of things into consideration.

Based on your explanation of the site's history, you had X amount of traffic from 1500 pages. Then Panda struck and your traffic went down to X-Panda. Since then you have added almost 70,000 pages and that has brought your traffic back to almost-X.

If that is in fact the way things have gone, you cannot ignore Panda -- you have to either do something about your site design or hope that the next training set expansion pulls you out of the downgrade category -- or the one after that.

Eventually, if your site doesn't come back, you WILL have to change it or change SOMETHING.

To clarify, here are the facts for our site:

1. On February 1st we added 4,000 new titles to our sites. We have moved from about 1,500 pages to over 6,000. Site traffic didn't change.

2. At the end of February we have been hit by Panda. We lost about 20% traffic.

3. After about 2-3 weeks, we recovered a little from Panda and were back to normal traffic. Nothing more though that one year before during the same time!

4. On June 16 we have been hit hardly by Panda, we lost again 25% of traffic from Google.

5. On June 30 we added over 65,000 new titles to our catalog. So now we have over 70,000 pages indexed on Google (submitted via sitemaps and confirmed indexing via Webmaster Tools).

6. As today, August 1st, no change in traffic. Nothing, nada. But I can find our pages on Google if I search for them (see above). And we are on the first page!

Thoughts?

Thanks.

Fab.

[Jill]

I don't agree with the premise that more pages on a site would mean more traffic. It doesn't make sense to me.

[Michael Martinez]

Jill is right. It's not just that you add more pages and you get more search coverage and VOILA! you get more traffic.

The pages have to create unique enough value that they can be distinguished from other similar pages by the search engines. Lacking that intrinsic value, they will have to be distinguished by inbound linkage.

By conventional measures, you would need about 250,000-to-500,000 inbound deep links to show the search engines that your 65,000 new pages have value.

In reality you may only need a few thousand deep links pointing into that content, but you have to have a good hierarchical structure on your site that is capable of channeling PageRank to the right places to complement that inbound linkage.

Even with a substantial boost in linkage, however, if your listings are no different from the listings offered by many other sites, you're still having to compete for front-page coverage on tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of terms.

You've made your job a great deal more challenging than it was when you had only 6,000 or 1,500 pages of content.

But add to that your belief that the Panda algorithm downgraded your site in late February and mid-June (after an intervening recovery). Adding 65,000 pages that replicate your existing site structure only magnified your site's low value footprint in Panda's data.

We don't know much about the Panda algorithm but based on research into Google employees' backgrounds, patents, and extensive review of everything Google has published or publicly disclosed about Panda, a small group of us in the SEO community (not necessarily including members of Jill's HighRankings Forum) have concluded that it's an artificial intelligence algorithm that uses a training set of manually reviewed Websites to identify pages that are "low quality". The standard for quality is set by Google and their Webmaster guidelines offer the greatest insight into what that standard may be. Keep in mind I'm just sharing third-party guesswork with you.

The way AI algorithms work, it's possible each time the training set is changed that the combination of signal scores a Website has earned also changes, and some sites may bob in and out of downgraded status without doing anything. But doing more of the same thing when you're on the cusp may increase the weight of the low quality indicators that Panda is using to downgrade your site.

Problem is, the algorithm MUST develop standards based on the data provided to it. If you feel your site has been affected by Panda you need to make radical changes and get as far away from your current design as possible. It's impossible to identify which signals are influencing Panda's decisions to downgrade your site.

[Catz]

Does the size of a website affect it's authority in Google?

http://www.youtube.c...;feature=relmfu

Just making a ton of pages doesn't make a website any better.

[imagine]

Yeah just having too many pages won't help. I agree. But if we do have more pages then won't the the chances of getting found by search engines bots increase? I mean, since we have more pages then there are more chances of getting detected? If we optimize each and every page properly, then will the chances increase?

[qwerty]

Can I quote myself?

Having more pages that are optimized for different keywords gives you increased opportunity for traffic. It doesn't necessarily mean more traffic, though, since it depends on how popular and how competitive those new keywords are.

And of course, it also depends on those new pages being indexed.

[rolf]

From my experience, in broad-strokes terms, adding more pages increases traffic, although it's fair to say that this in anecdotal evidence and I have not methodically tested it.

It's also fair to say that whenever I add pages it is generally within the very good advice of the above posts, making sure that each new page either adds some new functionality, (imho) useful content or keyword opportunity. As such, one would hope that the effect of such efforts would be increased traffic as, in theory, it is making the site better as well as larger.

Adding 10x the product pages is not going to increase the traffic by the same ratio, but I would expect to see some increase over time provided that I didn't just add 10,000 slight variations of each existing product. If I wasn't seeing any increase in traffic after such a dramatic increase in pages I would be looking first at internal link structure and then asking if each page offers something unique in terms of the text/images used, and then asking if the extra pages are really offering my visitors more choice or just muddying the waters.

After answering the above, I would be seriously considering if I need to just leave the pages to settle in a little - maybe leave them 6 months to see if over time they improve just by being gaining natural links and being seen to be stable pages.

Also, it may be useful for us all to know if the new pages have taken some of the traffic from the older pages or if the new pages just aren't getting traffic and the old pages are doing as well as ever - obviously these two scenarios have different implications.

[PurelyDigitalMediaUK]

Sorry to have joined the discussion so late!

The original post for this discussion highlights a key issue. It is important to get a good mix between quality and quantity. For seo I believe that the quality of the content is key rather than the quantity of what is being said. The main reason for more content is usually to offer a full description of what your company does/sells. It is key that this information is as succinct as possible and constructed in a way that makes it easy for people to find, read and engage with. I feel another issue highlighted with this initial post is that web content should be made for the visitors to your site and not for the search engines. the main focus and driver for the content should always be your clients and potential clients. If you present well constructed copy that takes people through a structured sales process it will almost always be seo friendly and relevant to your keywords (in my opinion!)

I hope this helps and does not result in a tirade of corrections as this is my first post on here!

Thanks

Mark

[Hichem]

Hi ...

Happy to be back

For the topic starter, can you tell us how did you add the new pages? I mean, are these pages different from existing pages? are these pages promoting completely different products , or these are slight variations of your existing pages ?

My point is, you probably gained traffic from the new pages, but lost traffic in the other hand from the old pages ..

example ..
you have an old page targetting the keyword : "123"
this page may be also ranking for the more specific keyword "1234"

now you add a page targetting the keyword "1234"
you will get traffic to the new page, but at the same time you will lose traffic coming from your old page ..


Anyway, I'm just guessing, it will be better if you give more info ..

You have analytics, and you know what are the landing pages, are these pages new or old ???

[WebsiteMaster]

Look at wiki. The more content on a website that is --->unique<--- the more traffic you'll get. Yes