Website-diet – more is not always better

Johannes Beus
An article on the SEOmoz-blog – which is absolutely worth a visit, by the way – has reminded me of a subject matter which, lately, I have frequently noticed while surfing: It is not only the Germans that are getting fatter, Websites are doing the same. While, in the past, shopsystems often displayed all the articles for one category one a single page, which led to a strain on the mouse wheel for comprehensive shops, now the pendulum is turning in the other direction. Some shopsystems or extensions generate numerous pages for every article (product description, price development, similar articles, etc) and fill them with content only sparsely.

Even though this is oversimplified and probably wrong for other comparisons, you can think of the “strength” that a domain receives from incoming links as a bathtub filled with water. This water is then spread out over the existing pages – the more pages there are, the less water each will receive.


Another problem arises through the fact that the content of many of these, often automatically generated, pages is the same. Only a handful of shop operators might sit down to write up a description, make picture or look for test reports and opinions for the 2.000 projects that they imported from their wholesalers database. With a little luck there will only be 2-3 sentences which will mostly consist of the technical specifications or the dimensions of the product. This can – thanks to the imbalance of unique content on the page and the recurrent elements on the page like navigation or the footer – quickly cause problems like the fall into the “supplemental-index”. Therefore we need to amend the often quoted wisdom of “more pages are better” with the supplementary “as long as they offer enough unique content”.
Johannes Beus - on Mon (04/23/2007) at 18:10 PM

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