LILY RAY: So what would you say for a publisher
type of website, that might talk about the same topic
every year, maybe the content is a little bit different,
but it's largely the same conversation?
Like, let's say they're talking about a certain type of skin
care treatment.
And they talk about it in 2017 and 2018 and 2019.
MARTIN SPLITT: Right.
LILY RAY: 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?
MARTIN SPLITT: Well, if it's-- it depends
on if it's an incremental change that happened, as in, like,
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 on 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're doing canonical tags.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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?
LILY RAY: We're going to talk about if too much content is
a good thing for SEO or not.
MARTIN SPLITT: Hmm.
All right.
So what is it that people believe about this?
What is the questions that you keep hearing and wonder about?
LILY RAY: Yeah.
I think a lot of companies think that maybe content is
good for SEO, so we should produce a lot of it,
because it will 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.
MARTIN SPLITT: 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, then sure,
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.
LILY RAY: Right.
So you would think that maybe having a blog
that talks about industry updates or things
that are relevant for that company is worthwhile,
but maybe not to just produce content
for the sake of producing content.
MARTIN SPLITT: 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, really, and then you're just spending--
crawling, and you're spending resources
on things that are not performing much.
LILY RAY: 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?
MARTIN SPLITT: Not necessarily.
I mean, it is not a site-wide factor,
but if, again, your blog or your website
is about something that is basically happening
on a regular basis or it has a lot of updates to it,
then that can help you bring relevant content to users that
would otherwise maybe not find 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.
LILY RAY: Right.
MARTIN SPLITT: But it doesn't change your search performance
or 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 will just
have content that keeps updating and changing without actually
giving value to the user, then that's not helping much.
LILY RAY: 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?
MARTIN SPLITT: 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 referring00 this is not about, necessarily,
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.
LILY RAY: Definitely.
Is there any way that Google tells us
if there's too much content, or maybe
that content's underperforming?
Can we look at our crawl stats to figure something like that
out?
MARTIN SPLITT: 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
or it's good if we're crawling it often.
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?
LILY RAY: Right.
MARTIN SPLITT: You get to decide.
LILY RAY: 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?
MARTIN SPLITT: 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 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?
LILY RAY: 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?
MARTIN SPLITT: 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 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 dense and helpful pages in one go.
Because how likely is it that I have exactly one question?
LILY RAY: Right.
MARTIN SPLITT: 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.
LILY RAY: So grouping it together.
I think that's one common theme that we
talk about a lot in the SEO world now,
is kind of consolidation.
MARTIN SPLITT: Yes.
LILY RAY: 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.
MARTIN SPLITT: Definitely.
LILY RAY: That's something that Google's
kind of appreciative when we do those types of things?
MARTIN SPLITT: 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
and another department thinks about it and 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.
Check this out.
And get the user this information,
rather than cannibalizing each other or just
like being duplication.
LILY RAY: And what about word count?
SEOs are always asking, is word count
a ranking factor, which I think Google's talked about
quite a bit recently.
MARTIN SPLITT: 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 2,000 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 on the same page, what's the point?
LILY RAY: Yeah.
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's not technically a ranking factor,
that's probably a good indication
that you need longer content, right?
MARTIN SPLITT: I mean, it depends.
Just because other people are doing
it doesn't mean that they're doing it right.
LILY RAY: Right.
MARTIN SPLITT: 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 of information
that people are looking for, and actually
fits the query intention of the user
better than what you're writing.
In this case, if you can reformulate it
so that your 500 words are better, then go with that.
Don't be the school kid that goes like, furthermore,
as I was saying, just, like, to fill in--
LILY RAY: Unnecessary language, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
And what's the criteria for determining if something
is spammy or auto-generated?
So take, for example, if you have 50 location pages for 50
states 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 of facts about that city, for example,
how does Google perceive those pages?
MARTIN SPLITT: That's a really tricky one.
Because either they work or they don't.
LILY RAY: Right.
MARTIN SPLITT: 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 the same kind of formula behind it.
If you have enough 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 there are literally two sides of a river.
And then they are having two different pages for this,
but they say pretty much the exact same things.
Maybe, like, five words are different
or something like that, and maybe a few numbers
here and there, like a different number of people
there, or whatever.
Then we might just consider one a duplication of the other
and not put it in the index.
We might de-dupe 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 canonicalization, really.
But if you have information that is
good enough and different enough from the other bits and pieces,
go for it.
LILY RAY: OK.
So you would encourage businesses
that are in that position where they do need to target highly
localized keywords, that it's OK to have those pages,
but really invest in making them as unique as possible.
MARTIN SPLITT: 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?
LILY RAY: Not exactly.
MARTIN SPLITT: Not exactly.
LILY RAY: 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?
MARTIN SPLITT: I'm actually not sure what the threshold really
is, but I know that we are basically fingerprinting
the content, and the fingerprint is
done in a way that allows us to say how similar is it.
We use different similarity metrics
and figure out, OK, 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 products, 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.
LILY RAY: Sure.
MARTIN SPLITT: So you have 1,000 words
in each of the product descriptions,
maybe, and reviews and whatnot.
But the price is different, the currency
might be different if in Switzerland,
and there might be like five different words or something
like that.
We consider them all to be the same.
And then you can actually shoot yourself in the foot
when you are trying to canonicalize all of them,
because we're like, that's not a helpful signal.
Because we determined that what you think
is individual pieces of content is actually
kind of the same thing.
But hreflang and help, again, and make sure
that we are surfacing the right 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's searching is located.
LILY RAY: Got it.
So use hreflang.
There's different dialects and different regions--
MARTIN SPLITT: 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.
LILY RAY: Got it.
MARTIN SPLITT: Thank you so much for being here
and talking with me through 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.
LILY RAY: Thanks for having me.
I think you answered a lot of questions that I have,
and my clients have.
So I really appreciate it.
MARTIN SPLITT: Hopefully this will be useful for everyone
out there, and thank you very much for watching.
LILY RAY: Thank you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MARTIN SPLITT: So the next episode
we have Barry Schwartz visiting, and we're
going to be talking about SEO community and Google
and how we can, you know, make the relationship better,
hopefully.
BARRY SCHWARTZ: Looking forward to it.