In today’s edition of Ask Kelli, a reader writes in to ask me about adding archives to their site.
I’ve done about 200 interviews over the past decade from industry professionals to performers and I want to add them into my new site all at once. Someone told me if I do that it could hurt my sites rankings. What do you think?
While it is true any major changes to a site including adding a lot, deleting a lot or changing a bunch of page URLs all at the same time can typically cause your site to go into what I call Google shock that can for weeks or in some cases months cause a flux in your rankings and as a result a dip in traffic, 200 pages aren’t going to be that big of a deal. Usually the shock is a result of thousands of changes all at once. 200 may seem like a lot to you, and it really is something to be commended but in terms of SEO it’s a tiny tiny drop in the bucket and hardly noticeable. There are guys out there making 100 posts a day. There are some sites pushing live archives of 10,000 old posts. Those are the sites that are going to go into Google shock. 200 won’t even be a blip on their screen.
But that being said I think you would be wasting a great opportunity if you did push them out all at once.
The thing about SEO is that it’s based on quality and consistency. People often seem to forget about the consistency part and yet it is really important to the big picture. If you make a post here and there that’s fine but if you make a lot of them on a regular basis, that’s even better. You already know the interviews are unique and that makes for good solid quality so now if you spread them out over weeks and weeks then you’ll get a boost in the consistency of posts. So really the best thing you can do is slow down. If you have 200, then post one a day, every day, in addition to your normal updates. At least that is what I would do. 🙂