Thin Pages vs. Shallow Content, and a pagination question
elearner
6:09 pm on Jun 23, 2011 (gmt 0)
What is the difference between "thin" pages & "shallow" content pages?
Also what is the value of pagination (2,3,4..15 pages) in the eye of Google?
goodroi
8:54 pm on Jun 23, 2011 (gmt 0)
Many people that ask me questions seem to use the terms "thin" & "shallow" interchangeably. The more relevant & engaging content you have on each page the easier it will be dealing with Google.
potentialgeek
6:41 pm on Jun 24, 2011 (gmt 0)
A page can be thick but shallow. (Long with lots of repetition/nonsense.) Thin is just short.
elearner
12:56 pm on Jun 26, 2011 (gmt 0)
thanks for the your feedback, can you please share your thought about pagination and its importance?
tedster
5:14 pm on Jun 26, 2011 (gmt 0)
Are you talking about paginated search results, or paginated lists of products within a category, or pagination of articles?
Planet13
5:18 pm on Jun 26, 2011 (gmt 0)
Also what is the value of pagination (2,3,4..15 pages) in the eye of Google?
Can you clarify?
Are you talking about an ecommerce site, where one category might have hundreds of products, so you have to paginate them across several pages?
Or are you talking about something like a newspaper article that they separate into several pages due to the length of the article?
If you are talking about the first type (ecommerce), I can tell you from a USER standpoint, that I dislike pagination. I would personally rather see a listing of smaller subcategories for me to drill down through than a more generic category page that I have to keep clicking the Next or Previous buttons to find what I am looking for.
I think that google appreciates that more as well. Having breadcrumb navigation on subcategories several levels deep also, IMHO, helps both users and google.
If you are talking about the second kind (i.e., a long narrative article that needs to span several pages), search the forums here for an excellent posting by tedster on "long form journalism" as he gives some very sound advice in there. I think it was posted around the fall of 2010.
elearner
1:24 pm on Jun 27, 2011 (gmt 0)
I am talking about paginated list of products within category or products. e.g. cell phone charger, we have 300 unique products and we are displaying 30 products per page. Content on all pages is different while page number in title and urls is differentiating them.
/cell+phone+charger.htm /cell+phone+charger_1.htm
@ planet13 - What else if we can't break them into further subcategories? since this product can not divided in further subcategories. If I remove paginated pages how user will reach on other 270 products?
