What do you think about SEO of big sites ?

[logoderivv]

Hi,

I was doing some research of new huge sites for example carstory.com that have over million pages and i notice that many new sites have strong growing for number of keywords and then at some point everything start going down

(Image of traffic drop attached)

there are no major updates at this time but you can clearly see even on recent kewyords changes that this site start loosing keywords every day , so number of new keywords are much less that lost keywords.

How would you explain it ? Is that at some point when site have more than X number of indexed pages then power of domain is not enough to keep all of them at the top and those keywords start dropping ?

Please share you opinion and if you have any experience by yourself with huge sites.

Thank You very appreciated

2LC3AxE

[ClaytonJ]

Firstly there is not enough shared information.

That said we manage several large sites and there are times were they are static and there are dips, but seasonal factors are huge for most large sites, from education to health insurance. So have you accounted for seasonal factors? Also the traffic growth is exponential at the start and from an outside point of view it seems that the landing page experience is not strong enough or not answering the searchers queries.

I would do a deep dive into onsite behavioral analytics and see how long they are staying on, and where dropping off. In short look for pogo sticking.

Hope that assists.

[logoderivv]

Hi,

Thanks for reply. I dont think its seasonal because its a clear that site loosing keywords in google everyday. So at some point at the beginning there was a boost and site was getting more new keywords each day than its been loosing, and now its loosing more than gaining.

[ClaytonJ]

Then I would go back to the landing page experience. What is your conversions rate? Are they averaging over 5 minutes on site or less... How many page views?  Are page views increasing?  A factor in seo is the landing page experience and how long the customers stick around and what they do. There was a site called jabong in india that had a similar issue - they kept improving the landing page experience and all the metrics slowly turned around.

If it not that you have to go back to basics and do a site audit, which you should do annually anyway. https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015

Hope that assists.

[logoderivv]

So you dont think its just domain authority (page rank) is not enough power to spread across all pages ? like when site has less pages power was enough and rankings climb up but when too many pages been indexed then it wasnt enough to spread across all pages ?

[ClaytonJ]

There are too many factors in rankings hence too think one factor is the answer is rarely the way forward.

Do a google search site:  That will give you a rough idea of page authority & no. of pages indexed.

I recommend to stop trying to find one "short cut" answer, step back do a site audit - properly identify what is going on. It could be that competitors are now all mobile friendly... so they now rank better. It could be anything.  Slow down do it properly, if you think it is domain authority alone, whilst doing a site audit obtain a relevant high authority backlink and see if that assists.

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Dani,

As John mentioned, there are so many factors involved that it's very tough to accurately pinpoint the reasons why a site might start losing rankings.

To answer your question directly - no, there is no tipping point where your link profile just isn't strong enough to carry a certain volume of pages. There is a similar scenario that could happen but I'll get to that in a moment.

The other thing is that to my knowledge, the traffic data in Ahrefs isn't 100% accurate like Analytics, it's more of an estimation based on extrapolating a smaller pool of data. I'm not completely sure about this but that's my understanding. Basically, the drops you're seeing might not actually be as pronounced as the graph indicates.

So, the type of scenario where there are "too many pages" is moreso related to the user experience. If you're creating large volumes of pages just for "better SEO", you're going to have a bad time. If your site has 20 real pages and 80 pages just targeting a keyword then this is where you're like to start seeing a drop in your rankings as the overall quality signals on your site begin to dip.

Users don't enjoy keyword-heavy and redundant pages and the metrics will demonstrate this to search engines very quickly.

You should always be looking to improve the strength of your link profile, but if you're worried about creating too many pages, don't be. Create the pages that make sense for the user, provide a great user experience and you'll be fine.

[Everett]

It sounds to me like you need to do a Content Audit with the goal of pruning out all pages with zero traffic and zero links from the index. See the following resources:

How To Do a Content Audit - Step by Step (Moz)

Classic Content Audit Articles (Linked-In)

Content Audit Case Studies (Linked-In)

Using URL Profiler for Content Audits ( URL Profiler)

Here's the slide deck for a presentation I gave last year about them.

Here's a recording of a webinar with the presentation above.

Common Content Audit Strategies I think the site you described would be considered Extra Large with a Penalty "Risk" so this is what the tool recommends:
"Focus: Prioritization of Pages for Content Optimization. Are you SURE there is no content-based penalty risk?
Most sites with this many pages have major content issues, meaning this would be the wrong “situation” for them. In the rare case that they don’t, prioritize the pages based on rankings, traffic potential, revenue… and propose how many to improve each month with ongoing copywriting and on-page optimization."