[New SEO Study] Fewer Pages = More Traffic

Summary

SEO expert Kevin Indig's study reveals a significant inverse correlation between the number of indexed pages and organic traffic growth since 2023, challenging the belief that more content equals more traffic. The research suggests that Google prioritizes high-quality content over quantity, indicating a shift towards valuing unique, non-replicable content. The video discusses the impact of Google's August 2024 core update, emphasizing the importance of domain quality monitoring and technical SEO to avoid traffic drops. It also highlights changes in Google's AI Overviews and search result layout, urging content creators and SEOs to focus on adding genuine value to the web.

Takeaways

• 📉 A study by Kevin Indig suggests that there's an inverse correlation between an increase in indexed pages and organic traffic growth since 2023, challenging the belief that more content equals more traffic.
• 🔍 Google appears to prioritize fewer high-quality pieces of content over a sheer volume of content, indicating a shift in indexing and ranking strategies.
• 🚫 Google's recent updates seem to be fighting against 'scaled content', which includes using AI tools to generate content without adding value to users.
• 📈 Some websites have seen an increase in organic traffic by monitoring and improving the quality of their indexed pages, demonstrating the importance of content quality.
• 🛠️ Technical issues such as duplicate content and broken pagination can significantly impact a site's organic traffic, as seen in the examples provided.
• 📊 SEO experts recommend developing a domain quality monitoring system to track metrics for each page, including inverse bounce rate, conversions, clicks, and ranks by page type.
• 🔄 Google's August 2024 core update has mixed effects, with some sites recovering and others facing declines, emphasizing the dynamic nature of SEO.
• 🌐 The update highlights the importance of geographic specificity and first-person accounts in travel niches, rewarding original information and experiences.
• 🤖 AI Overviews are now affected by core updates, with Google incorporating more traditional search ranking signals into its custom AI overviews source picking.
• 🔑 Google is placing more emphasis on site authority and verification, as seen in the introduction of blue ticks next to some websites in search results.

Q & A

What startling trend has Kevin Indig's study uncovered regarding content production and Google rankings?

Kevin Indig's study has found an inverse correlation between an increase in index pages and organic traffic growth since 2023, suggesting that publishing lots of content to achieve topical authority might be counterproductive.

How does Google's approach to indexing and ranking web pages seem to have changed according to the study?

The study indicates that Google now prioritizes fewer high-quality pieces of content over sheer volume of content, and has increased its minimum content indexing quality bar, likely as a measure to fight against scaled content and to improve the quality of data for training its AI models.

What impact did the bug causing duplicate archive pages have on an undisclosed domain's organic traffic?

The bug led to a significant increase in indexed pages, which in turn caused the domain's organic traffic to drop by around 30%.

What was the result of ClickUp's attempt at a programmatic SEO play to increase organic traffic?

ClickUp's index pages increased significantly, but this led to a 50% drop in organic traffic, from an estimated 1.6 million visitors to around 800,000.

How did Progressive.com manage to increase its organic traffic?

Progressive.com reduced its indexed pages from over 30,000 to just 2,000 by monitoring and improving or removing low-quality pages, which resulted in an increase in organic traffic from around 2.9 million to 6.2 million monthly visitors.

What is the new mantra for content creators and SEOs as suggested by Kevin Indig's research?

The new mantra suggested is 'If you can't add anything new or better to the web, it's likely not good enough,' emphasizing the importance of quality over quantity in content production.

What are some of the trends observed by Cyrus Shepard regarding the August 2024 core update?

Cyrus Shepard observed that many sites previously hit by updates didn't show much improvement, with only about 20% of those seeing significant declines recovering. He also noted a preference for geographic specificity and first-person accounts in travel niches.

What is the significance of the changes in AI Overviews as a result of the August 2024 core update?

The changes indicate that AI Overviews are now being affected by core updates, with Google matching AI Overview sources to the top web pages from the top 10 organic search results 99.5% of the time, suggesting a shift towards incorporating more traditional search ranking signals.

How have recent updates by Google impacted the layout of search results pages?

Google has introduced several updates including a courses search carousel feature, larger favicons in search results, and blue ticks next to some websites, indicating a focus on brand visibility and site authority.

What is the debate of the week raised by the video regarding content production strategies?

The debate is whether sites with fewer pages are now at an advantage over scaled content, or if the traditional belief that more content equals more traffic still holds true.

Outlines

00:00

📉 Impact of Content Clutter on SEO Rankings

SEO expert Kevin Indig's study reveals an inverse correlation between the number of indexed pages and organic traffic growth since 2023. This challenges the traditional belief that more content leads to more traffic. The study suggests that Google prioritizes high-quality content over quantity, and rapid content scaling might negatively affect rankings. The video discusses the implications of Google's updated indexing approach, the impact of the August 2024 core update, and the importance of monitoring and improving low-quality pages to avoid traffic drops.

05:00

📈 Strategies for Boosting Organic Traffic

The video highlights the importance of focusing on quality over quantity in content production for SEO. It presents examples of websites that improved their organic traffic by reducing low-quality pages. Progressive.com is cited as a case study, where reducing indexed pages from over 30,000 to 2,000 led to a significant increase in monthly visitors. The discussion emphasizes the need for a shift in mindset towards quality and the implementation of domain quality monitoring systems to track metrics like inverse bounce rate, conversions, and clicks.

10:03

🔍 Google's Evolving Search Landscape

The video discusses various updates and changes in Google's search algorithms and features. It covers the effects of the August 2024 core update on different websites, the shift in Google's approach to favoring geographic specificity and first-person accounts in travel niches, and the impact on AI Overviews. It also touches on Google's updates to search result layouts, including larger favicons, blue ticks for site authority, and the introduction of a courses search carousel feature. The video concludes with a debate on whether sites with fewer pages have an advantage over scaled content in the current SEO landscape.

Keywords

💡Content Clutter

Content clutter refers to the excessive amount of content on a website that can overwhelm users and potentially harm the site's search engine optimization (SEO). In the video, it's suggested that Google is sensitive to this clutter, and an increase in indexed pages can inversely affect organic traffic growth, challenging the traditional belief that more content equates to more traffic.

💡Topical Authority

Topical authority is a concept in SEO where a website establishes itself as a trusted source for a particular subject by creating comprehensive and valuable content. The video discusses how the approach to achieving topical authority might need to change, as rapidly producing a large volume of content on every topic within a niche may no longer be effective due to Google's updated indexing and ranking algorithms.

💡Organic Traffic

Organic traffic denotes the visitors that come to a website through unpaid search results. The video highlights a study that found an inverse correlation between the number of indexed pages and organic traffic growth, indicating that the quality of content might be more important than its quantity for driving traffic.

💡Google Core Update

A Google Core Update refers to significant changes made by Google to its search algorithm that can impact search results. The script discusses the effects of Google's August core update, noting shifts in rankings and the emergence of new winners and losers in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

💡Scaled Content

Scaled content is a term used to describe the strategy of producing a large volume of content to cover as many topics as possible. The video suggests that Google's new approach to indexing might be countering this strategy, as it seems to prioritize fewer high-quality pieces of content over a sheer volume of content.

💡AI Overviews

AI Overviews are a feature in Google Search that uses artificial intelligence to provide a summary of information on a topic. The video notes a change in Google's approach to AI Overviews, where they now more closely match the top web pages from the top 10 organic search results, indicating a shift in how Google selects sources for these overviews.

💡Page Quality (PQ)

Page Quality is a metric used by Google to estimate the effort and quality behind a web page. The video explains that Google uses a large language model to determine if a page can be easily replicated, which affects how it ranks in search results. This metric is part of Google's efforts to improve the quality of content indexed and displayed in search.

💡Duplicate Content

Duplicate content refers to substantial blocks of content that appear on the internet in more than one place. The video script uses examples to illustrate how duplicate content, often caused by technical issues like broken pagination, can lead to a decrease in organic traffic and is something that needs to be monitored and addressed for effective SEO.

💡Technical SEO

Technical SEO involves optimizing website architecture, server settings, and other non-content related factors to ensure the site is accessible and crawlable by search engines. The video emphasizes the importance of addressing technical issues like broken pagination and duplicate content to maintain and improve organic traffic.

💡Domain Quality Monitoring

Domain Quality Monitoring is the practice of tracking various metrics for each page on a website to assess its quality and performance. The video suggests that having a system in place to monitor domain quality is crucial for understanding how individual pages contribute to the overall SEO strategy and performance of a site.

💡Schema Markup

Schema Markup is a form of microdata that helps search engines understand the content of a web page. The video mentions that Google has been updating its documentation on supported schema markup, which can lead to higher click-through rates and potentially influence rankings.

Highlights

A study by Kevin Indig reveals an inverse correlation between an increase in index pages and organic traffic growth since 2023.

Publishing lots of content for topical authority may now be counterproductive according to recent SEO trends.

Google's approach to indexing prioritizes fewer high-quality pieces of content over sheer volume.

Sites with more indexed pages are likely to have lost traffic after the October 2023 core update.

The concept of topical authority, involving rapid creation of pages on every topic, is challenged by recent findings.

Google's minimum content indexing quality bar has increased, affecting how they fight scaled content.

Low-quality sites were deindexed during the March 2024 core update, suggesting a quality tier system by Google.

The open web has shrunk while Google must crawl through massive content platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok.

AI chatbots providing instant answers are making mediocre and poor quality content redundant.

Google is training its AI model, Gemini, by incentivizing the generation of better quality data.

An undisclosed domain experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic due to indexing of duplicate archive pages.

ClickUp's organic traffic dropped by 50% after increasing index pages from 17,000 to 37,000.

Progressive.com increased organic traffic by reducing indexed pages and improving content quality.

SEO strategies must evolve to focus on quality over quantity to avoid traffic drops.

Google's August 2024 core update shows mixed results with some sites recovering and others declining.

In travel niches, Google favors geographic specificity and first-person accounts over general travel blogs.

SEO should focus on publishing content that is unique and not easily replicable by others or AI.

AI Overviews are now affected by core updates, with Google matching top web pages more frequently.

Google is placing more emphasis on site authority and verification, as seen with the introduction of blue ticks next to some websites.

Google has updated its Search Console documentation to better explain supported schema markup for search appearances.

Google Search may use the OG:title meta tag for title links in search results, impacting SEO and CTR strategies.

Transcripts

Are you secretly sabotaging your Google rankings by scaling content production?

A new study by Kevin Indig has uncovered a startling trend.

There's often an inverse correlation between an increase in index pages

and organic traffic growth since 2023.

But does that mean that publishing lots of content to achieve topical authority

is now counterproductive?

And how can you leverage this insight to boost your own traffic?

We'll find out in this episode.

We've also analysed the continued fallout from Google's August core update, and the

data tells a pretty fascinating story.

Some unlikely winners are emerging, while some former titans are actually tumbling

down the rankings pretty significantly.

Plus, a new change to Google's AI Overviews finally gives you

a clear path to ranking in them.

Hi, I'm Mark Webster, co founder of Authority Hacker and strategic advisor

over at Marketing Pros.

Today's video is brought to you by Search Intelligence.

More on them a little bit later.

Let's start by unpacking some eye-opening research

that's challenging the long-held belief that more content equals more traffic.

Nobody likes clutter, but it turns out that Google

may be more sensitive to content clutter than most SEOs had previously thought.

A new study by SEO expert Kevin Indig explores recent changes

in Google's approach to indexing and ranking web pages.

Using data from a number of larger websites, he uncovered the extent

to which Google prioritises fewer high-quality pieces of content

over sheer volume of content.

He found a direct inverse relationship between the number of indexed pages

and organic traffic since the October 2023 core update.

The more indexed pages a site had, the more likely it was to have lost traffic.

We'll dive into some real examples of these sites in just a moment.

But first, consider how this challenges the popular concept of topical authority,

or at least a version of it that involves rapidly making thousands of pages

about every single topic in your niche.

At first look, it seems that Google's minimum content indexing quality bar has

drastically increased in recent months, which is probably how they approach

fighting what they call scaled content in real life, a term that they've recently

come up with in their webmaster spam policies that includes the somewhat

ambiguous infraction of using AI tools to generate content without

adding value to users.

This change could also partially explain the wave of low-quality

sites getting deindexed during the March 2024 core update.

Google would have put some of these sites in the lowest quality tier

and deemed them too low quality to be part of its index.

Indig also expands on why this might be happening, highlighting

two trends that have impacted how Google approaches indexing.

First, while the open web has shrunk, Google must crawl through

massive of content platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok.

These sites often use complex JavaScript frameworks, making it expensive

for Google to find new content.

And at the same time, the ability to get instant answers from AI chatbots

is changing the underlying dynamics of the web by making mediocre and

poor quality content somewhat redundant.

And there's probably a third reason here, and that's training Gemini,

Google's frontier AI model.

Ai needs quality data to get better.

So by killing the incentive to pollute the web with lower quality

content, Google makes you generate better data to train its own model with.

Now, let's take a look at some real-world examples that Indig

provides in his newsletter.

But first, here's a quick word from today's video sponsor,

Search Intelligence.

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frontman Chris Martin's admission that he only eats one meal per day.

They contacted journalists to provide expert commentary

from their client, Bulk.com.

Now, their data-driven approach looked at trends on both Google

and TikTok, to find insights that fitness and nutrition experts were sure to love.

And sure enough, they landed 40 links from super high quality websites,

including Healthline and Huffington Post.

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to supercharge your link building, head on over to search-intelligence.

Co.Uk.

Now, let's get back to some shocking examples from Indig's research.

In one case, an undisclosed domain had a bug that broke pagination and caused it

to index many duplicate archive pages.

The number of index pages shot up from around 6,000 to about 13,000.

Immediately after this massive influx of low-quality pages, the domain's

organic traffic dropped around 30%.

Another example is ClickUp, the popular project management software.

They got a bit excited and decided to attempt a programmatic SEO play

to juice up their organic traffic.

Their index pages went up from around 17,000 to 37,000.

Almost immediately, organic traffic went from an estimated

1.6 million down to around 800,000.

That's a 50% drop. Ouch.

And if you want better odds at avoiding a similarly painful traffic drop, make sure

you're subscribed to our channel.

We share the most important news in SEO and search marketing

every single week, helping you stay on top of Google's latest changes.

When these surges of low-quality pages happen, Indig found that the main symptom

is a severe decrease in top three rankings.

He shared examples of sites losing 36 to 45% of their organic keywords when

the surge of low-quality pages occurred.

But Indig also found examples of sites that managed to increase

their organic traffic by monitoring and removing or improving low-quality pages.

Sites like Progressive.com,

that went from just over 30,000 indexed pages down to just 2,000. Their

organic traffic shot up from around

2.9 million monthly visitors to 6.2

million today, according to Ahrefs.

They also moved a lot of the removed content

to a separate domain, progressiveagent.

Com, which now sits at a healthy 80,000 traffic as well.

Indig says the stakes for SEO videos are high.

Expand too aggressively and your whole domain might suffer.

The idea of infinitely scaling your site for all the keywords

that you can think of with little care for how well each page is put together

seems to be a thing of the past.

The tricky part is that Google doesn't always punish these sites right away.

Quite often, you'll see them surge before they drop heavily.

It's like a sugar rush followed by a crash.

We're seeing this play out in the August 2024 core update, and we have

some new discoveries from that which we'll share later in this video as well.

But these observations by Indig also reflect some of the findings

we highlighted in our recent Google leaks analysis video.

We found that Google has a metric called page quality, or PQ,

which uses a large language model, LLM, to estimate the effort behind a page.

This helps Google determine if a page can be easily replicated.

This makes SEO much more complicated more complicated

than simple on-page rules and links.

If an LLM applies advanced reasoning to judge a page's quality and how well it

should rank, we need to step up our game.

As Indig puts it, We need to change our mindset about quality

and develop monitoring systems that help us understand

domain quality on a page level.

He stressed the importance of a domain quality monitoring system

to track metrics for each page, including inverse bounce rate, conversions, clicks,

and ranks by page type.

It's also crucial to identify and address technical issues

like duplicate content and broken pagination, as we saw in the examples.

If you're still running SEO like it's 2016, let this be a story

warning that mass publishing low quality content is very likely to make you

dig your own organic rankings grave.

One quote from Indig's newsletter really made us think.

If you can't add anything new or better to the web,

it's likely not good enough.

This should be the new mantra for content creators and SEOs alike.

Meanwhile, Google's August 2024 core update is still rolling out,

and industry experts are keeping a close eye on who's winning and why.

ZyppySEO founder, Cyrus Shepard, has been tracking the effects

of this update on a database of sites, and the results are, well, mixed at best.

According to Shepard, many sites that were hit a year ago in

September's helpful content update, HCU, or last March's core update,

aren't showing much improvement.

Of the sites he monitors, only about 20% of those that saw significant declines

in Google traffic over the past year are now seeing at least some recovery.

While on the flip side, around 20% of sites that saw significant gains over the

past 12 months are now facing declines.

It's like Google's playing musical chairs with your rankings and not everybody

gets a seat when the music stops.

Shepard's findings reveal some interesting trends.

In travel niches, for instance, Google seems to be favouring geographic

specificity over general travel blogs.

First-person accounts and hands-on experience are also getting a boost,

with original information, photos, and analysis being rewarded as well.

Echoing a statement we've heard before, Shepard notes in relation to Google's

statement to 'Stop doing things for SEO' that he believes this is sound advice.

He goes on to say that he thinks, SEO has a long life for promoting businesses,

but if I were to start a site today, I'd focus on publishing content

that's unique to a degree that other people or AI couldn't replicate.

So while it seems that SEO is not dead, the days of some

of the old tricks may be numbered.

Lily Ray, VP of Amsive, has observed that LinkedIn

and India Times, which inexplicably ranked for numerous queries in the USA

before the update, are now experiencing a decline with this core update.

But the real insight comes from her observation about Google's direction.

She asks, who can drive the most with the least?

Suggesting that fewer pages, less content on the page, and

less obsession over what the algorithm seems to want is the way forward.

This echoes Kevin Indig's observation from a previous story, reinforcing this idea

that the main rule of SEO today is that there are no rules anymore.

Barry Schwartz has noticed a positive change from many

sites; the return of previously missing thumbnails in search snippets.

This issue was likely related to how Google calculated site quality.

Sites that didn't meet whatever the quality threshold

was were unable to show images in rich results in the search results.

Now it seems quality metrics were adjusted for some sites to meet those thresholds.

Finally, Ian H from Niche Site Growth hits us with some cold reality.

In his analysis of HCU to August core update traffic changes for 2,398 sites,

he didn't find any true HCU recoveries.

Of course, it's important to remember that true recoveries will likely take longer

than a few weeks, but it still seems that the road to recovery from the HCU

is still a long and winding one, even if you're winning with the current update.

It also looks like this core update shook things up with AI Overviews.

A recent analysis of 36,000 keywords by SEOclarity found AI Overview sources now

match one of the top web pages from the top 10 organic search results 99.5

% of the time.

That is a significant shift as Google has previously routinely shown sources

outside of the top 10 results in the earlier days of AI Overviews.

Remember, this more diverse approach to sourcing backfired spectacularly

when Google was called out for giving dangerous and wrong answers,

like the fact that eating spaghetti with gasoline was a good idea.

The backlash was so severe that Google had to massively reduce the visibility

of AI overviews to just 7% of queries recently while promising improvements.

In response to this debacle, it appears that Google may now

be incorporating more traditional search ranking signals as part of

its custom AI overviews source picking.

This drastic change brings us to an important realisation.

AI Overviews are now being affected by core updates.

Google's John Mueller confirmed this, stating that these are part of search

and core updates affect search.

This means we can expect shakeups in the results pulled into AI Overviews whenever

a core update happens from now on.

It's like Google's applying its traditional quality measures

to its cutting edge AI features as well.

Now, unfortunately, tracking metrics from AI Overviews in Google Search Console

continue to be a headache for SEOs.

There have been calls for AI Overview filtering options in Search Console

similar to those for featured snippets, but currently, there's no consistent

method for tracking overview performance.

This lack of transparency makes it hard for site owners

to understand how their content is performing in these AI-generated results.

Google has been busy lately rolling out a series of updates that affect not just

rankings and AI Overviews, but also the very layout of the search results pages.

First up, Google started displaying a courses search carousel feature,

as reported on X by SEO Charles Floate.

This is likely triggered by the course schema markup.

If you're in the education business, it might be time to brush up on your schema.

Favicons in search results are now significantly larger.

This change reflects Google's increasing emphasis on brand visibility

within the SERPS.

As a result, your brand's favicon is likely to have a greater impact

on click-through rate, CTR, which in turn can influence your rankings.

Google also seems to have taken a page out of Elon Musk's playbook

as they're starting to roll out blue ticks next to some websites.

It's hard to tell what triggers the blue tick at this point, but it's clear

Google is placing more emphasis on site authority and verification.

Google has also been improving the documentation on what schema markup

they support in search.

They've updated their Search Console Search Appearances documentation

to show a table format that explains the supported appearances

with a short description, API value, and the bulk export field.

It's also a good idea to look at what schema markup matches the content

of your site, as these features often lead to higher CTR, which again

can lead to higher rankings.

Google has also updated its title link search developer documentation.

They've added that Google Search may use your OG:title meta tag title for

your title link in Google search results.

This is a bit of a curveball, as the best practise was to write a keyword

optimised title tag to boost your SEO and a high engagement OG title

to improve your CTR on social.

However, the fact they don't show the title tag doesn't mean

it doesn't count against your ranking.

So you may be getting the best of both worlds with this change.

Only time will tell.

Now, all of these changes lead us to our debate of the week.

Do you think that Kevin Indig's research is correct

and that sites with fewer pages are now at an advantage over scaled content?

Or do you think that more content equals more traffic is the way to go?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

And while you're there, make sure you grab our free list of 50 high

paying affiliate programs you can use to earn over $100 per sale.

We'll add a link to those in the comments and the description below.

And finally, if you like this video, you'll definitely want to

check out this video here as well.