Too Much Content – An Increasingly Common SEO Problem

It is with a heavy heart that I write these lines, but I feel that I must. Too often I see cases where content publishing has gone too far. This is probably the result of well-meaning advice from SEO agencies and SEO consultants.

More content is not always better. If you think otherwise, I’d like to remind you of Demand Media. When the Panda update hit and completely collapsed the company’s business model, they had to cut large parts of their content just to survive. Here’s some interesting reading about Demand Media. The truth is this: more content is better—until it’s not.

The limit where your content becomes harmful

For every page you add to your site, you increase the chances of capturing traffic from Google. Each page is an opportunity, and anyone looking to scale quickly realizes that publishing more pages can mean faster growth than those who don’t. But there are three key factors that set the boundaries for this.

The quality of the content

If your content is valuable, comprehensive, and attracts readers, it will take longer before you reach the point where publishing more becomes harmful. While one can question the quality of certain articles on Wikipedia, overall, from Google’s perspective, the content is valuable enough that the site ranks at the top for an enormous number of search terms. It’s not just about the actual quality, but also how the content is perceived. Similarity between your pages plays a big role here—if they are just quick rewrites of each other, it’s time to be cautious.

The authority of the site

If your site is very strong in the eyes of search engines—again, Wikipedia is a good example—you can get away with more. A site with a large number of authoritative inbound links will be able to rank with more pages across more search results. This principle applies broadly in SEO: the more authority you have, the more you can get away with.

The actual volume

The last and most complex factor is the actual volume. It’s hard to pinpoint an exact number, but a site with five pages will probably never face this issue. A site with one hundred million pages, on the other hand, almost certainly will. The first problem you may notice here is internal cannibalization—a weaker article sometimes ends up ranking for a keyword where you’d really prefer another. This often manifests in very unstable rankings for the targeted keyword.

There is good reason not to go overboard with content. I’ve seen countless good websites take a hit simply because they didn’t know when to stop. Don’t get greedy. Cleaning up a site is often far more complex and time-consuming than doing it right from the beginning.