Answer Hero How To Videos

As some readers will know, some time ago when checking our logs on CompareStorePrices.co.uk we found a huge amount or keyword phrases that were question oriented. For quite a while Chris wanted to create a simple Q&A feature and in spring/summer this year it was implemented.

We found it worked pretty well but monetised at a much lower rate than the rest of the site as it was all very long tail stuff. Then we found a major problem… for every page in the new Q&A section, it was limiting the opportunity for results in our more valuable shopping comparison section.

We can’s prove it 100% but it would appear that our site (CSP) has reached a limit in the overall number of pages that we can get into the index (without a large increase in inbound links) and thus we are actually hurting ourselves by growing more pages with less commercial value.

We therefore made a decision to hive off lots of Q&A data and set up live on a new domain: AnswerHero.co.uk (as you will know if you have read this blog).

So anyway – we thought great! that will do for now. But oh no…. because we kept our Q&A functionality live on CSP, over the last few months our Q&A database has grown massively even though we have tried to restrict its activity by having AH outrank it for the long tail stuff.

So what we have decided to do is this, we have taken a radical axe to our database on CSP and deleted 90% of all Q&A and also stopped any new manual posts going up. I think at some point Chris will migrate the deleted files to AH but not sure when. Once Googlebot sees they are gone, hopefully it will then rank our shopping pages back higher.

The moral of this story is that it is important to evaluate what pages you have in your site and what value they bring so that if you have a large site with lots of semi-profitable pages compared to other pages, consider if it is worth keeping them at all.

One Response to “Is it always a good thing to have more pages?”