Many pages describing services or just a few?

[maxkennerly]

Hello,

I'm in a professional services industry. My services, and my competitors' services, can be broken down into about 20 categories or so. Most of my competitors have 50–100 pages describing their services, pages all cross-linked with appropriate anchor texts, but pages that have a lot of duplicate (though rewritten) content. That is, each individual page is pretty shallow, but they create the structural appearance of a lot of relevant content.

Should I do the same, or should I just stick to the 20 categories with a handful of cross-links as necessary? This will allow me to get more relevant keywords on the page, and will likely be easier for the user, but might make Googlebot think the site isn't as deep, and it might affect my ability to do as many internal anchor text links.

[eyepaq]

In my personal opinion I think you should do what's best for your users.

Once on your site will a user be more confortable with less options as far as clicks and pages or they need to browse and read as much information as posssibile ?

If you know your industry well you understand your users too so you will probabably know the answer.

Based on your answer you can get the best out of it from a SEO perspective - anyway, both options have both positive and negative aspects.

Baisicly in my opinion is not just about what's best from the SEO side - is what's best for the users and then improve it from the SEO side.

To make the long story short you should go with the 100 pages version

[AlanMosley]

more pages the better, but use link sculpting the make the most of them, one thing to keep in mind is that its one think to make landing pages that get users, but its another to move them to tbe money making pages to make a sale

[eyepaq]

As far as I know link sculpting is obsolete.

Personally I've stop using it since Matt C anounce the no follow new count back in the days.

Using iframes and javascripts or even flash is not, in my opinion, a viable solution.