Significantly reducing number of pages (and overall content) on new site - is it a bad idea?

[McTaggart]

Hi Mozzers  - I am looking at new site (not launched yet) - it contains significantly fewer pages than the previous site - 35 pages rather than 107 before - content on the remaining pages is plentiful but I am worried about the sudden loss of a significant "chunk" of the website - significantly cutting the size of a website must surely increase the risks of post-migration performance problems?

Further info - the site has run an SEO contract with a large SEO firm for several years. They don't appear to have done anything beyond tinkering with homepage content - all the header and description tags are the same across the current website. 90% of site traffic currently arrives on the homepage. Content quality/volume isn't bad across most of the current site.

Thanks in advance for your input!

[crackingmedia]

Hi Luke

For sure, carving away 2/3rds of your previous site is a big chunk, but I don't think that should overly concern you.

If you had said you were thinking of doing this a couple of years ago, I would have encouraged you to think again on the basis that the more pages your site had, the more weight it had, the more pages could be optimised and the more entry points there were from search.

With changes in recent months to Google search, in particular the move to semantic search and away from Boolean search, then having a keyword rich site, with many well optimised correct keyword density pages, shouldn't be the focus any more.

I'm not suggesting that having 35 pages compared to 107 pages is better. What I am saying is that it is better to have 35 sharply focused, high quality pages than 107 pages that don't have the same definition and focus. The measure should most definitely be quality over quantity, both on a page count basis and even on a word count basis.

What I would focus on with your 35 pages is making sure they are well structured (so many on-page SEO rules still apply - so make sure the faulty parts you mentioned are fixed) and the navigation is clear.

I am sure you know this, but make sure that your pages are customer-focused, so that they answer the type of questions your customers are asking in the language of your customer, and where related questions could occur, make sure there are good internal links between related content pages.

Finally, when you do the switch, I would just make sure that you think about your 301 redirects. Where an old page no longer exists on the new site, then redirect it to the closest related page.

I hope that helps,
Peter

[McTaggart]

Thanks Peter for you useful input, as ever. How do you manage onsite keywords in content these days?

It's incredible how often the 301 redirect thing is overlooked by developers managing migrations - oh the number of times I've been called in after the developer has 301'd everything to the homepage (or not even bothered doing any redirects).

[crackingmedia]

Hi Luke

No problem. You asked:  How do you manage onsite keywords in content these days?

I am not clear what you are asking. Please can you clarify?

Peter

[McTaggart]

Hi Peter - sorry yes not that clear! I was asking about Keyword density I suppose - I know many SEOers suggest it's irrelevant, yet I spend much of my time removing penalties from sites and Keyword stuffing is causing issues.

If I see a penalty which I think is stuffing related I check densities and drop to 3% maximum  - that appears to have reversed penalty a couple of times.

[crackingmedia]

Hi Luke

I wouldn't say keyword density is totally irrelevant, but what I mean by that is that you would expect to see on any page the keywords related to the subject of that page. But attempting to add keywords to a page to increase density to make it more indexable is not what you should be doing.

The focus of a page for semantic search needs to be the subject as a whole so content should be written for the whole in much the same way as you would write offline and include related content where relevant.

I'm not sure if there really is a safe percentage as such for keyword density, but suffice to say that the higher the percentage the more likely a page will be seen as spammy. I would have thought in most cases though <3% should be fine.

Peter