• Register
• Log in

SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog

Algorithm analysis, Web community relationship analysis, SEO practices and techniques, industry news, etc.

• Home
• About SEO Theory
• SEO Glossary

Leveraging empty content

Posted by admin on December 19, 2006 in SEO Theory

One of the most underutilized aspects of search engine optimization today is leveraged content. People go to the trouble of building sites with thousands of pages of content and they build in virtually no cross-promotional strategies. And what amazes me is that many eCommerce and advertising sites choose to serve empty pages to their visitors.

Leveraging Pre-Generated Blank Content

If you’re generating blank pages for 50 states and 500 cities, but only have content for a few dozen cities at best, you could be generating a lot of unique, useful content to your visitors that the search engines would be willing to live with.

Assuming your 500 detail pages are coming out of a content management system, there should be a database running in the background. That database can be used to insert cross-promotional messages that inform your visitors of related content. Which is not to say I think you should generated 500 doorway pages. If someone came to me and said, “I’d like to create a page for every major city in America”, I’d ask, “What will you put on those pages that is relevant to those cities?”

A lot of commercial sites try to grab the name space before they can offer any products or services. They don’t understand how they burn themselves by showing their hands too early. You hurt yourself in three ways by serving empty content pages: first, you leave the visitors to your site with a bad experience they’ll remember; secondly, you tip your technological capabilities to competitors and would-be competitors; third, you tell the search engines that value and content mean nothing to you.

First impressions are the most important impressions. If you don’t have 500 pages’ of unique content, you have absolutely no business case for serving 500 unique URLs. But it’s easy enough to give people a reason to visit an otherwise empty page: make it an interact experience.

If your Atlanta, GA page has no content, put a form on it that people can use to contact you and suggest what they are looking for. You may not be able to satisfy all requests, but if you set the form up properly, you can easily see from the data you collect which areas are drawing the most inquiries (without asking people to go through a lengthy click-form process).

Furthermore, after they have submitted that form, you need to serve them a “thank you” page. Put some message on that page (which won’t be indexed by search engines) that help guide your visitors to more useful areas of your site. Brand the people who visit your site with a memorable, friendly, service-oriented experience.

As you collect data, you’ll quickly get an idea of which areas need new content the most. Use the user feedback to populate the sections of your site that you now know require the most attention. There are other ways to get visibility for empty content pages without asking the search engines to crawl, index, and possibly filter or flag those pages.

A simple rule for large content sites that are released before they are populated is to ask visitors what they want to see first. Do it as conveniently as possible, so that users don’t feel like they are being asked to spend their lives on your site.

Reusing expired URLs intelligently

When you expire content you don’t necessarily have to retire pages. You can embed static messages that tell people the old content is gone, but suggest newer, more relevant content. Just be careful not to create a reference chain, where one old page directs visitors to other reference pages. Set a schedule for permanently retiring pages based on deep inbound linkage, referrals, and traffic patterns.

You can gradually delist, deindex retired pages and use them to inform new visitors that the site has changed. Without redirecting people, you can politely (and compellingly) say, “Hey, you followed an old link and this page will be removed, but maybe what you’re looking for is here or there.”

Those links can, of course, help the search engines find the newer content. Once that content is indexed, you can set meta tags on the old pages or modify your robots.txt to exclude the older pages from being crawled. The point is that you don’t have to abandon the value which may have accrued in an older page when the page is no longer fulfilling its original puropse. Use that page to help build value in similar, related new content.

Capturing mal-formed link referrals (Error 404 handling)

There are so many opinions about what to do with 404 traffic it’s hard for people to form a good strategy. Now that Google and Yahoo! allow you to authenticate Web sites, it’s important to take their expectations into consideration. You can design a custom 404 document that provides current links (a sort of mini-site map) to help visitors who have ended up on non-existent URLs. The search engines should see a 404 code returned in the headers for the document.

Google Webmaster Central will tell you where GoogleBot finds 404 pages. You can create a map of missing content and decide whether to just 301 redirect the inbound traffic (which may only consist of robots — check your logs to see who is requesting those dead URLs, which may be due to typos in other sites’ links to your site) or to create custom content pages. Custom content pages at least give your visitors something useful. Think of them as landing pages, similar to the content-rich landing pages you create for your PPC campaigns.

While no one wants to create bad URLs, the truth is that a well-linked site eventually ends up with a chain of 404 URLs. You have absolutely no control over how other people link to your site. Even links that were once good eventually become stale as other Webmasters lose interest in their pages and stop updating them. Sooner or later, if you earn good links from other sites, and your content grows and changes, you’ll have to deal with 404 referrals.

What you do for people who hit those non-existing pages can directly impact your conversions. So why not leverage your unintentionally non-existing content that still has inbound links from sites you cannot change?