Publishing More and Ranking Less

What changed about volume

Publishing a hundred pages used to require a hundred pages of work, so volume was a rough signal that somebody had invested something.

That relationship has broken. A hundred pages is now an afternoon, and everybody can do it.

Which means volume no longer distinguishes anybody and, more importantly, no longer indicates anything to a search engine either.

So the strategy of publishing more, which worked for years, has stopped working at exactly the moment it became easy.

How added pages make things worse

• They compete with your existing pages.
• They split the signals between them.
• They dilute the assessment of the site.
• They consume crawling on nothing.
• They confuse which page answers what.

The first is the mechanism people miss. Four new pages on variations of the same subject compete with the one page that was ranking, and the result is frequently that none of the five does as well as the original did alone.

Quality is assessed across the site

Which is the part that makes this more than a per-page question.

The guidance introduced last August was explicit that a proportion of unhelpful content can affect how the rest of a site is assessed.

So forty thin pages do not simply fail to rank, they can pull down the pages that were working.

That is the opposite of how most people assume it works, which is that a bad page is merely a wasted page.

It also means the remedy for a site in this position is removal rather than addition.

Which is a difficult thing to accept after paying for the pages.

A worked example

A business with nine pages added thirty-six over a fortnight, one for each service crossed with each town they cover.

Each was a few hundred words with the service and town names substituted.

Three months later the original service pages had fallen, the new pages had never ranked, and total traffic was below where it started.

They removed thirty-two of the new pages, kept four for the towns where they genuinely do most work and wrote those properly, and left the original pages alone.

Traffic recovered over the following months to slightly above the original level.

The whole exercise cost them six months for no gain.

The test before publishing anything

Which is short and prevents most of this.

Does this page answer a question that no existing page of ours answers.

Would somebody arriving on it get something they could not get elsewhere.

Is there anything on it that only we could have written.

If the answer to all three is no, the page should not exist, and the material should improve an existing page instead.

That third question is the one that eliminates most proposed pages, and it is the one that matters now.

Improving beats adding

The strategic point underneath.

Taking a page that ranks on the second page of results and making it substantially better usually returns more than three new pages.

It already has some standing, some links, and some history, which a new page has none of.

And the work is easier, since you know what it is about and what it is missing.

Look at what ranks between positions six and twenty for anything commercially useful and start there.

Most small business sites have three or four such pages and have never touched them.

Watch for pages competing with each other

Since this is measurable rather than theoretical.

In your search console, look at which of your pages appear for the same query.

Where two or three of yours are competing, that is a signal to merge them into one stronger page and redirect the others.

That regularly produces a better result than either page achieved separately, and it reduces the page count.

It is also the single most common finding on a site that has been adding pages for years.

If you have already done this

Since some businesses reading this added the pages last month.

Identify which added pages have received any arrivals from search at all over a couple of months.

Anything with none, and nothing specific on it, can be removed or merged.

Keep and improve the few that got any traction, which tells you where the genuine demand was.

Do it in one pass rather than gradually, and expect a few months before the effect is visible.

The pattern is what gets noticed

A practical point about how these problems are actually identified.

Thirty-six pages appearing in a fortnight, each a few hundred words with two words substituted, is a shape that does not occur when a business is writing about its own work.

It is that pattern, rather than any individual page, that marks a site out, which is why the town-by-service grid is the version that reliably fails.

A business genuinely covering four towns writes four different pages, because the work in each is genuinely different and it has something specific to say about each.

If you cannot write a meaningfully different page for a town, that is the answer about whether the page should exist.

The counter-case

More pages is sometimes right.

A business genuinely offering nine services needs nine service pages, and a shop needs a page per product.

Sites can also be too thin, and a business with four pages competing against ones with forty substantial ones has a real gap.

And a page that is not working is frequently a page that needs to be better rather than one that should be deleted.

Apply the three questions before publishing, improve what ranks in the second page of results, and merge pages competing with each other.

What to do

1. Ask the three questions before publishing.
2. Check what only you could have written.
3. Find pages ranking six to twenty.
4. Improve those first.
5. Find your pages competing with each other.
6. Merge and redirect them.
7. Remove what got no arrivals.

Step two is the question that now decides everything, since it is the only one whose answer cannot be produced by anybody with an afternoon and the same tools you have.

The argument for restraint is covered in publishing less and meaning more.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.