 So what would you say for a publisher type of website that might talk about the same topic every year? Maybe the content's a little bit different, but it's largely the same conversation. Like let's say they're talking about a certain type of skincare treatment and they talk about it in 2017 and 2018 and 2019. Do you think they should take the same piece of content and update it each year or should they have three different pages for that topic? Well, it depends on if it's an incremental change that happened. If the skincare routine is pretty much the same as it was last year, you can maybe rephrase it a little bit, but I would say you update the existing page and maybe just reposition it somewhere more prominently than your website for the visitors to see. But I wouldn't create a new page that basically says the same thing because especially when they're really similar, we might just think one is a duplication of the other and then canonicalize them together no matter what you do in canonical tax. Hello and welcome to SEO Mythbusting. In this episode, my guest is Lily Ray, SEO director at Path Interactive and we're going to discuss an interesting topic that you might want to learn more about. What is it that you brought for us today? We're going to talk about if too much content is a good thing for SEO or not. All right, so what is it that people believe about this? What is the questions that you keep hearing and wonder about? Yeah, I think a lot of companies think that maybe content's good for SEO so we should produce a lot of it because it'll help us rank for a lot of different keywords and maybe we should put out a new blog post every single week to the point where their website has thousands of blog posts and maybe they're not performing really well. So I think a lot of people have a question about how much content should I really have and to what extent does this actually help my performance. Oh, that's a really good question. So I think just going back to the basics, your key is to provide information to your users, right? How much content is good for that depends a little bit on what you're doing. If you're a news site and short cover as much of the happenings that you can but if your website is about a specific product then there is only so much you can say about it and just keeping rambling on in a single page is not helping you much. Right, so you would think that maybe having a blog that talks about industry updates or things that are relevant for that company are worthwhile but maybe not to just produce content for the sake of producing content. Not for the sake of producing content. If you have something like if you have a product that is very versatile and different users or different customers are using it in very different ways then this would be an interesting thing to provide, basically say like, oh, look, our product can be used for this, our product can be used for that. But just for the sake of content, that's basically the same as having light content or useless content, right? And then you're just spending crawling and you're spending resources on things that are not performing much. Right. Is like the presence of a blog and showing Google that you're producing new content something that helps your performance overall as a kind of site-wide factor? Not necessarily. I mean, it is not a site-wide factor but if, again, this is your blog or your website is about something that is basically happening on a regular basis or has a lot of updates to it then that can help you bring relevant content to users that would otherwise maybe not find to your website, especially if your users don't know about what you're doing then the blog that reports on current events or developments can actually help people understand that, oh, there's this company that does this interesting thing but it doesn't change your search performance or like ranking or anything. It's just providing something relevant and useful to users that is going to help you if you're just putting it out to have a blog or if you're just like, hey, we just have content that keeps updating and changing without actually giving value to the user then that's not helping you much. So if you have an older piece of content would you recommend that if it's a high-quality piece of content do you need to go back in there and make updates or should you only do that when something significant has changed? I think you should update it if something significant has changed for sure if nothing has really changed what you can do instead is you can write something different, new content have a fresh piece of content and just link that other piece of content to say like, hey, by the way, this is like referring this is not about necessarily you search relevancy or anything but it's more helping the user understand that there is other interesting content for them and it's keeping them on your website making sure that they get the information they were looking for. Definitely. Is there any way that Google tells us if there's too much content or maybe that content's underperforming like can we look at our crawl stats to figure that something like that out? So crawl stats are a bad place to look at this because the fact that we are not crawling something again does not mean that we are thinking it's bad it's good if we're crawling it off and what's more interesting would be to look at the performance report for instance in Search Console. If you are seeing that you get a lot of impressions but not that many clicks you might want to change something about the content if you are getting a lot of clicks through it but then you see in your analytics that actually not much action happens then you can ask yourself is the traffic worth it or do I need to change my content there? There's no such thing as too much content it's just, again, think from the user's perspective what is the thing that I want the user to understand and is the user interested in spending time on a page where they need 27 minutes to read everything Right. Yeah. You get to decide. Definitely. If there's a lot of content that's not necessarily performing well on the website could that be something that kind of brings down the overall trustworthiness or authority of the website from Google's perspective? That depends a bit on what is the reason for it not performing if it's spammy content, if it's very thin content then that can bring you down a little bit in terms of we might just spend crawl budget on pages that are in the end not performing or not even being indexed anymore and you might actually want to avoid having spammy content and bad content especially if you get penalties or manual actions you want to definitely clean up there but besides that it is usually a good idea to see oh this piece of content really does not perform well let's take it down or at least change it, right? Sure. And what would you think for companies that have something like a help center where there's a lot of content that answers very specific questions but maybe it's only one or two sentences per page and maybe they have 500 pages of that nature would you say that's something that they should remain indexed on Google or how does Google treat those types of pages? That's a really good question that might be treated as light content as like thin content and not necessarily useful I would try to group these things and structure them in a meaningful way if it's a question about a specific like range of products then you can group all these questions together to one page or if you have questions in the category of troubleshooting or operating the thing that you're trying to sell try to group this together to have more dens and helpful pages in one go because how likely is it that I have exactly one question if I have one question I might have a follow up question or I might have a similar question so putting these all together is a good idea So grouping it together I think that's one common theme to talk about a lot in the SEO world now is kind of consolidation so do you think there's a case to be made for one maybe you have two pieces of pretty similar content and they would be better as one single article so doing a lot of merging and redirecting that's something that Google is kind of appreciative when we do these types of things We have less crawling to do, that's great we also know where to send the users then and there's a chance that if you have similar things that these come from organizational reasons like it's one department thinks about it none of these two talk to each other so if you consolidate that you bundle more relevancy and information in one place and that makes it easier for us to figure out oh yeah this is a good site to check this out and get the user this information rather than cannibalizing each other or just like being duplication And what about word count? SEOs are always asking is word count a ranking factor which I think Google has talked about quite a bit Yeah we've talked about this quite a lot and it's not a ranking factor if you can say what the user needs to know in 50 words that is fantastic if you need 100 words that's cool if you need 2000 words that's also absolutely acceptable it's again about trying to figure out what's the intention if you see yourself repeating yourself multiple times and saying the same things over and over again in the same document or in the same page what's the point? Well let's say you're in a situation where you've written 500 words for a specific topic or keyword that you're trying to rank for and you see all your competitors have 4,000 words or something like that even though word count is not technically a ranking factor that's probably a good indication that you need longer content right? I mean it depends just because other people are doing it doesn't mean that they're doing it right right so if you see them rank high that might not continue to be that way just because they have a high word count again try to understand what is it that the users need maybe the larger word count just accidentally hits the right bits and off information that people are looking for and actually fits the query intention of the user better than what you are writing in this case if you can reformulate it so that your 500 words are better than to go with that don't be the school kid that goes like furthermore as I was seeing just like to fill in a necessary language yeah and what's kind of the criteria for determining if something is spammy or auto generated so take for example if you have 50 location pages and you want to talk about the business which is largely the same in all those places but you basically just swap out the name of the city and maybe add a couple facts about that city for example how does Google perceive those pages that's a really tricky one because either they work or they don't so generally speaking if you are using generated content and that is really relevant and good and a human sees this and goes oh I like this you're probably on the right track that can work for these pages where you have different information for different cities but it's pretty much like the same kind of formula behind it if you have enough like facts around it and there's relevant information in there that changes city to city that might really work it might also not if it's too similar and you basically we see that in places like Germany sometimes that are literally two sides of a river and then they're having like two different pages for this but they say pretty much maybe like five words are different or something like that and maybe a few numbers here and there like different number of people there or whatever then we might just consider one duplication of the other and not put it in the index we might dedupe it and eliminate it from the index and then there's not much you can do if we think it's the same kind of content then what's the point? why would we show the same content on multiple URLs then we come back to kind of localization really but if you have information that is good enough and different enough from the other bits and pieces go for it okay so you would encourage businesses that are in that position where they do need to target highly localized keywords that it's okay to have those pages but really invest in making them as unique as possible make them relevant and helpful for the user the user is the key here really and if you're just copying data over from one place to another is that that helpful? not exactly can you talk a little bit more about how Google treats or how does Google determine what duplicate content is what's the threshold for duplication I'm actually not sure what the threshold really is but I know that we are basically finger printing the content and the finger print is done in a way that allows us to say how similar is it we use different similarity metrics and figure out okay so this is pretty much 95% of this is the same thing we see again we see that in the German speaking countries a lot where for instance a shop operates in Switzerland and Germany and Austria all of this is in German and then they have the same product and the price is slightly different due to whatever reason Switzerland has a different currency but that's pretty much the entire difference maybe they use a few different words because the local dialects are different so you have a thousand words in each of the product descriptions maybe and like reviews and what not the price is different the currency might be different if it's Switzerland and there might be like 5 different words or something like that we consider them all to be the same and then you can actually shoot yourself on the foot when you are trying to canonicalize all of them because we are like that's not a helpful signal because we determine that what you think is individual pieces of content is actually kind of the same thing but href line can then help again and make sure that we are the same version so we might only be indexing and canonicalizing one of them but we will be showing the different versions of these depending on where the person who is searching is located use href line when there's different dialects and different regions definitely if that's your issue but if it's literally just the content is slightly different because maybe you have different prices or something like that then we would consider that the same content thank you so much for being here all these questions regarding content and what is good content and what's too much and what's not enough content and this was really helpful and interesting and thanks so much for making it here thanks for having me I think you answered a lot of questions that I have in my client's house I really appreciate it hopefully this will be useful for everyone out there and thank you very much for watching thank you so the next episode we have Barry Schwartz visiting and we are going to be talking about SEO community and Google and I'll make the relationship better hopefully looking forward to it