Very large websites once had enormous advantages. Companies like Ehow understood this and systematized it until the Panda update. Panda put an end to it, and there may be even more reasons to review your content today.
Quite a few in the SEO community are now talking about reducing the number of pages on a site. What is usually done is cleaning up pages that do not receive any traffic anyway. Partly to prioritize the pages on the site that are important, but also to adapt to a Panda-world. If you have a large number of pages on your site that can be judged as uninteresting, there is a risk that you may be affected by Panda.
This is especially true for duplicate content. In recent months, we have seen even greater success from cleaning up duplicates than we’ve seen before. By cleaning up, for example, filtering pages in webshops, either by merging pages or using canonical, we’ve seen significant traffic jumps. That has always been the case, of course, but recently the differences have been much larger. It’s worth remembering that it’s difficult to assess the scale — we can’t measure how a certain site would have acted before compared to now. At least our view is that it has more impact now.
Actions worth considering
So what should you take away from this? To begin with, it is absolutely certain that there are very good reasons to keep an eye on your duplicate pages. Counter duplicates as much as you possibly can.
Also, consider whether you have a lot of pages on your site that never get traffic. Do they really serve any purpose, or could you remove or merge them?
Magnus Bråth
Consultant & Adviser
Magnus is one of the world's most prominent search marketing specialists and primarily works with management and strategy at his agency Brath AB.