Adding Pages To Your Site May Lower Your Rankings
Posted by Al Scillitani on February 18, 2008 – 8:32 amRumor: If you add pages to your site, you will dilute your backlinks and your sites rankings will be affected.
Hypothesis: I have helped optimize 100’s of sites and have not witnessed this occurrence happen before, however I have never tried it in a controlled environment where the only change that took place was the addition of pages. My hypothesis would be that nothing would happen. My hypothesis was wrong!
Process: Add a new category to a site that currently has about 1500 pages. The new category is related to the other products of the site (not duplicates, but same theme). The new category would add approximately 100 pages to the site.
Test: When site is stable (averaging the same position for a several weeks) add the new category and pages to the site. Do not make further changes to the site until at least a week after the site has been visited by googlebot.
Our home page was in position #2 for our main term in Google. The site has a Google PR of 4. After adding the new category and about 100 pages, our rank dropped from position 2 to 5 within 3 weeks. The site has been live for over one year and has never been below position 2 before this time.
We added an index, no follow tag to our new category page making the category page visible to the engines, but blocking the 100+ new pages behind that category page (no other way for engines to find those pages). Within 3 weeks we were back to position 2.
Conclusion: Adding pages to a site may affect your rankings. After all of this, why did I write “may?” Even though I firmly believe the additional pages caused the drop in rank, I also believe there are other factors involved and I cannot make a blanket statement that this will happen to all sites.
I think you have to take into consideration the size of the site, the number of pages being added, and the quantity and quality of backlinks to home and deeplinks to interior pages. If you add 100 pages to a 50,000 page website that already has great backlinks, I do not believe it would have any effect on the sites rankings.
I would love to hear others opinions especially if you have increased the number of pages to your site with about 10% new pages all at once. Whether or not you arrived at the same conclusion, please feel free to comment (include size of site, PR, number of pages added, etc…).
7 Responses to “Adding Pages To Your Site May Lower Your Rankings”
Great first post Al, look forward to reading more.
By Brian on Feb 18, 2008
Just an opinion here, but it could be because of the “unnatural” thing. It’s kind of unnatural to increase your link count by 500 in a week, in the same way that it is kind of unnatural to add 100 pages that are very related to current live content.
No idea how this is deduced algorithmically, but thought I’d throw in my .02
Post more like this. Good stuff.
By Dan Perry on Feb 18, 2008
I’ve noticed serps turbulence for all my clients and my personal sites over the past couple weeks… that could be affecting things too?
I haven’t poked around to see if that’s a wide spread thing or not.
Keep the posts coming!
G
By Garrett on Feb 18, 2008
Ya many factors could come into play. I think the quality of the back links are important. For example if you have a 50,000 page website all with great back links to every page then you will have a high ranking. If all of a sudden you add a bunch of content with no good back links. I can see where they might think you are purposefully trying to gain ranks through adding pages. I guess this comes to prove that it’s not the amount of work you put into the site it is the quality of the site. Therefore in this sense adding content would make your ranking go down.
By Scott Easterday on Feb 18, 2008
Thank you for all your comments so far. The hard part is trying to figure out a way to overcome this obstacle.
If our site gets a new product line we have to add it to our site. If we block them with no index, we miss out on the long tail. If we dont block, we may drop in ranking for the broader terms.
I think the best way to proceed would be to block, make sure products are added to paid search account, then work on backlinks to those pages. Once the pages have some back links, then unblock them.
Any other ideas?
By Al Scillitani on Feb 18, 2008
Is it possible to “unblock” a page or two every week or something?
I don’t think adding a bunch of backlinks and then releasing them to the search engines will help all that much, b/c I agree with Dan Perry that the search engines are more concerned with how “naturally” you’re adding pages and links.
By Nathania Johnson on Feb 18, 2008
Nathania, that is a good plan. I think I would combine it will the backlinks though.
1. block the new pages
2. add products to paid search
3. add backlinks
4. unblock one or two pages a week to make it look more like a natural addition to the site.
By Al Scillitani on Feb 18, 2008