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I have heard conflicting opinions on this in the past. Am just debating adding a whole load of static copies of frequently requested dynamic pages to relieve a struggling tech solution.
So, in other words clicking "show by price descending" will be a link to another static page rather than a call on the processing time.
What effect will adding twice as many pages to my site have on typical page / current pages PR? I've heard it said pages have intrinsic PR and this adds PR to a site. Likewise, it's been said in this forum that the PR will be spread more thinly over more pages. Which of these is true?
Oh, and does anyone know whether there will be duplicate content issues?
Ta
Suggy
Please, someone take pity on a thickie and answer the question....
Nicer sites get more links.
Those static pages will add more links and link text to your other pages.
They will give the user what they want.
They will give the bots more keyword combinations.
So what if the PR of a couple of pages drop by a fraction. Get more links to compensate.
Cheers,
Steve
Play with one of the many online javascript PR calculators to get a better feel for it. Adding one link from a sub-network out to a large group of pages won't really affect the sub-net much.
The good news is that pure PR doesn't count as much as it used to in ranking.
Haven't seen the "too many pages added" penalty, but adding lots of pages with duplicate content (from page to page, or duplicate with other pages on the network) can definitely trigger some sort of negative results.
On my big site (around 7000 useful pages), which is the only one that adds a lot of pages each month, there are around 200 content pages added each month. In addition, there are around 50 navigation pages. With all this going on, there has only been one down traffic month in the site's history.
And that is not even counting the thousands of additional pages that google adds to their index of our site each month as they dig deeper into the calendar and other useless pages in the blog section.
This past spring, in the course of a couple of days, I added a page listing "other reviews by this reviewer" and "other reviews of equipment by this manufacturer" which would have been similar in concept to what you are suggesting adding. Back then, there were no problems with this.
So I just can't say that I have experienced any such problems myself. But I am not adding 2000 pages to a 300 page site. I am adding 500 pages to a site where google already knows about well over 10,000 pages.
So to get back to the question that I started with, how many pages does your site already have, and how many will you be adding?
Sorry for the delay - busy dying of TB.
Basically I reckon I would be adding 100 pages to a 350 page site.
Cheers,
Steve
Anything that you do has a chance of causing a fluctuation in your traffic. But unless your ranking relies almost totally on your PR, it sounds like what you are doing will create a stronger, more stable site.
Yeah, it will dilute your PR, but it will add content and anchor text. And you are doing it for your users, which is the most important thing.
And before you discount the value of that internal anchor text, my two top pages, as far as referrals from google, have no known external links. They only made their way up in the SERPs when I added those pages that I mentioned earlier. YMMV
Thanks for all your help.
Much appreciated.
I've been trying to work out how I am going to get suffient external links to each of hundreds of articles, guides and contents pages. I thought that was essential.
Nope. Not at all. Internal links will work just fine.
FWIW, linking to your new pages from the home pages can be useful. That's been my experience, anyway: When I link to a new page from the home page, it's usually in the Google index within a day or two.
If the site has 350 pages, I suspect that the PR of the home page is not that much of a concern. It is the PR of the internal pages with all the content.
Linking to every page above the current page, all the way back up to the home page is simply good site design. It is just convenient that it also works well for search engines.
See that line up above where it says
Home / Forums Index / The Search Engine World / Google News
and they are all links. Those are known as cookie crumbs, and you should put that on every page (using your own style, of course)
They are good for your user, and they are good for the search engines.
A couple of comments about internal anchor text:
While there is quite a bit of discussion about varying your anchor text from other sites so that it does not appear unnatural. There is little concern about that when it comes from your internal links. It is the nature of internal links, especially those in the navigation template of all your pages, to use the same text.
While they are not an honest vote of what other people consider that page to be about, if it is in the template of the site, it is generally what the publisher of the page thinks the page is about. While some webmasters will use this as an opportunity to jam in keywords, most will be considering the look of their site to their users.
So it certainly does make sense for google to put some weight on internal anchor text
If adding too many static pages at one time a concern, you might want to try this, add a just few pages addressing major sections of you FAQ or whatever ir is.
Then subdivide those pages later as needed.
If you study the on page traffic on a page using the bookmarks (how many clicks on a link to a bookmarked section) you'll get an idea of which content is more important to visitors. Those are the first sections to split off onto new pages.
That'll give you a reasonable rate of increase in page numbers. And those new pages will probably help you with the search engines too.
And, yes, the power of anchor text in internal links can be dramatic. Dramatically good, and dramatically bad, so be careful.
My pet theory is that PR is being drained from outbound links faster than it is being assigned to the recipient pages. Although this is just speculation, I have definitely stopped adding pages in massive quantities
