It’s a word that is associated with a lot of fear, loathing and distrust: diet. One thing it hasn’t been associated with in the past is SEO. The search engine optimisation industry does need to develop some kind of miracle diet, though, because there are plenty of sites out there carrying a lot of useless flab – flab that could be dangerous to their health.
There are millions of surplus pages on the internet, and when you find one on a site you’re more than likely to find hundreds. These kinds of pages resemble flab because they are dragging the site’s health down. They contain little in the way of text or valuable information. One of the main SEO jobs for such sites is simply to cut these pages away, or beef them up with content.
Why are these extra pages so damaging to your site? Having a big site is an asset with the search engines, for sure, but only if the extra pages contain something valuable, something the search engines can consume. If huge sites automatically ranked well, every retail site would get excellent rankings. As it is, most retail sites struggle with the search engines because their size is more due to flab than to muscle, and their content is mostly duplicate due to the product descriptions that can be found on every other retail website.
Think of your site as a healthy body. Adding extra pages full of low-quality content is much like providing the body with nothing but junk food. Adding pages of healthy, good-quality content is more like giving your site the five fruit and vegetables a body should get each day.
Consider which kind of website you would rather have, and stop feeding your site web pages like doughnuts.
Now, as it’s 2011 and we’ve all no doubt put on a few pounds over the last two weeks, who’s coming with me to the gym?
Just me then? In that case, I’ll leave it.
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There are millions of surplus pages on the internet, and when you find one on a site you