Organizing Content - Landing Page vs. Posts?

[ichthyous]

I am in the final stages of working on replacement for my ten year old photo site. The new site uses Wordpress and I have taken great pains to match the URLs of the categories on my old site in order to avoid redirecting them. The old site had pages that were duplicated across multiple categories, and buried in directories up to three levels deep. In the new site all posts are at the top level and have one unique url that is referred to from whichever categories or tags the post is tagged with. 3,200 content pages on the old site are being merged into about 1,000 on the new site via 301 redirect.

Some of the more important category pages on my old site are a landing pages, with a thumbnail menu of sub-categories. In the new Wordpress site the content is organized into smaller and smaller sets of posts...for example:

/photos/europe/ = photos of europe, including a selection from Spain
/photos/europe/spain/ = photos of Spain, including all cities in Spain
/photos/europe/spain/barcelona/ = photos of Barcelona only
/photos/europe/spain/madrid/ = photos of Madrid only

My questions are...1) Can referring to the same posts in ever decreasing sets be construed as duplicate or thin content since so much content overlaps? and 2) Is it better to keep the landing page structure than just to dump a broad selection of posts at the top category level? Does anyone have and experience with both ways of handling it, and especially if you have switched from one way to the other what were the results? Thanks for any replies

[Andy Langton]

duplicate or thin content

These are very different concepts. I'm sure there are varying opinions, but my view is that:

- Duplicate content is a highly similar (or exactly identical) copy of the content that Google interprets
- "Thin" content is a deliberate attempt to make a ranking page, but without any genuine content

Google wants to forgive technical ineptitude (although there are performance gains from avoiding the wait for forgiveness) and punish manipulation (there be dragons).

Do your pages make sense as "landing" pages - i.e. the first experience someone has of your site? I suspect, from what you've posted that they probably do not. Users who land on your site have no context - they don't know who you are or where they are. Can you accommodate that with a generated page?

I'm not making any judgement about the site involved, but hoping to provide some food for thought :)

[ichthyous]

Thanks for the response Andy. I always had these types of landing pages and they serve as the portals to various collections of photos by genre or location. It's a photography site and its hard to rank well on lots of different categories without some sort of customization of the main category pages. Each category is a large body of photos... Large enough to serve as a separate website, but I never wanted to split them off. And I'm fairly certain that people understand the context when they hit the page. If they search for architectural photography for example and then click a link to the architecture section of a photographer's site they have a pretty clear sense of what they are looking at since it's a page of images related to their search. They have all the informational links at top menu and at bottom (ie bio, awards, purchase photos, contact us etc.) The issue for me is that there is considerable overlap in content...some photos are included in 4 categories. If you have numerous categories but a lot of the posts are repeated isn't that thin content?

[ichthyous]

I should clarify that by repeated I mean that the same post with a unique url may appear in 'architecture', 'Washington DC architecture', and 'black and white architecture'. I'm starting to think that so many specific sub categories may cancel out the ranking of the main architecture page, rather than bringing in lots of additional traffic through specificity.

[aristotle]

Do you mean that the same photo (and same url) is sometimes included in several different categories or subcategories? I don't think that's likely to cause any problems with google. Also, some occasional "lateral" cross-linking between pages or files in different categories is probably okay. But I would limit these practices to cases that could clearly be helpful to visitors

[ichthyous]

Yes Aristotle exactly...the same photo is included in multiple categories...it's cross referenced by it's properties (i.e. by location, by bw or color, by type etc.) But the photo only resides at one url at the top level. The question is whether a landing page which refers to the category's subcategories will perform better than just a page of posts.

[aristotle]

ichthyous -- I'm having trouble understanding you question. Maybe it's the term "landing page" that confuses me. Could you try to clarify?

[ichthyous]

I am using "Landing Page" here to describe a top level category page...one with the broadest search term about a subject that serves as the point of entry to the site for a set of subcategories. So for example if you have several sets of distinct content, in this case photos, each Landing Page would be the first page of that category...i.e. architecture, landscapes, cityscapes, locations, etc. Currently my site's landing pages show just a thumbnailed menu of that category's subcategories...for example, the architecture section landing page shows links to Exteriors, Interiors, Architectural Details, Contemporary Architecture, etc. They have to choose a subcat before actually seeing any photos.

On the new site, the top level category "Landing Pages" show a broad selection of photos (posts) from all the underlying subcategories...people are not forced to choose a subcat in order to see content. At top under the category description is a small menu of text links linking to the available subcategories. Each individual post also links back to whatever category/subcat it is included in. So they can still find the subcats, but their presence is less evident on the new site.

I had asked the question about infinite scroll previously here: [webmasterworld.com...] I am using infinite scroll to push people through the content more quickly. The IS on my site's theme works very well and is designed more or less according to Google's recommended specs for infinite scroll. In the page header the next page in the series is declared via link rel="next" and one can find each set of ten posts on its own page as Google recommends. With so many images, it's tedious and slow to expect people to click 30 page links to see pages of photos...it won't work and they will give up before seeing much. The new site will require fewer choices and will expose people to a lot more content more quickly.

[aristotle]

On the new site, the top level category "Landing Pages" show a broad selection of photos (posts) from all the underlying subcategories...people are not forced to choose a subcat in order to see content.

That sounds good to me, since the images could help get the visitors' attention , and could also help get more traffic from google's image search.

I assume that you're using the prudent amount of image file compression (for these landing page images) to balance image quality with loading speed. The positioning of the images on the page to get the top section loaded quickly, and then images further down load in time for downward scrolling. Also the presence of the images shouldn't be an excuse to neglect the navigation menu which should be kept prominent and easy to understand.

[ichthyous]

The theme loads ten image thumbs at a time at 500px each. That's quite a lot, but it zooms along due to the infinite load, which loads thumbnails in the background while the user is scrolling. With pagination the entire process is much slower and tedious and I'm sure nobody looks at all 30 pages clicking links to each page.

The top menu is just a list of text links, not as user friendly as I'd like at all and I haven't found a decent way to handle displaying so many subcategory options without making the entire page a menu, like on my current site. I think the categories are really there to be indexed by google and to bring in traffic on specific search terms, but I don't think many people need such specificity. I may have the site overcategorized...i.e. too many cross-referenced subcategories. Some categories overlap, for example there is a category for black and white, one for panoramas, and one for black and white panoramas. Same for architecture...one for architecture, one for panoramic architecture, one for black and white architecture, one for NYC architecture, etc. That's a lot of very specific categories. I am only carrying them over to the new site because I want the site indexed as quickly as possible so I am keeping existing urls wherever possible

[tangor]

You do have an opportunity to reduce the clutter/cross during the move process and 301's from the old to the new cat and sub-cat pages will keep things moving along.

It is possible to get too granular. I would think, in the case of a photo site, that the end trail with 30 or less images is a good place to be.

[aristotle]

Usually a vary long navigational menu is put along the left margin of the page. This might work better than trying to squeeze it in at the top of the page.