Pages vs. Posts for SEO & Site Authority

[mpw45233]

Hi everybody.

I've been watching Vita's videos, and have read all of his tutorials.

I've learned alot about adding related content to make your site more relevant to your niche. In Vita's examples he uses several related categories and subcategories.

Can you get the same effect from adding many related pages? I have microniche sites, and my main goal is to try to rank the homepage. But I use interior pages to try to rank for more specific terms, and they seem easy to rank when I have some keywords in my domain.

I'm fairly sure that my interior pages are helping the homepage. But can adding more related interior pages help other interior pages?

Is using posts & categories a more powerful approach? When I look through search results, I see an equal amount of posts and pages in the top spots.

Any other insights would also be appreciated...Posts vs. Pages

Thanks in advance

Michael

[mpw45233]

Found a partial answer in this thread. http://vitavee.com/forums/thread-303.html

Funny I missed that. I've been through that thread several times.

For anybody that's new to this forum, you'd be doing yourself a huge disservice if you left without watching Vita's videos. They are excellent. If you're a newbie (like me), watch them at least twice. They are in the blueprints, strategies, and tips forum.

Ok, now I'm rambling...So should pages only be used for subjects that don't neatly fit into a category...about....contact etc...? Any tips for a newbie?

Michael

[Nik]

It depends on what you're wanting to do really. The way themes are set up is they usually display pages across the top of your blog besides the "home" link and so forth. Usually u have your privacy, tos, about to pages, there as well and are set up as pages. And the content of what your website is about is set up as blog posts. If you want to have a secret pages like a thank you page for subscribers as an example, you will set this up as a page and use a plugin to exclude it from the top menu.

good luck
Nik

[mpw45233]

Hi Nik. I know this question is a little ironic since last week you were answering my questions about how to set up a static site.

Vita's videos got me thinking though. Though I know I'll get some traffic from the new articles, my main goal is to boost rankings for my home page which is a static page optimized for a specific keyphrase.

I've used Vita's approach with the wonder wheel, and Google related searches, to pick out several categories for the site. My blog (posts) page will actually be an interior page. I may even exclude some categories from the menus.

This is entirely for seo reasons, I didn't know categories were so important for relavancy of a site. So will having a well structured, highly relavant (in Google's eyes) blog within my site, boost my static home page? I know every post links automatically back to the home page?

Trying to think like Google

Thanks again

Michael

[Nik]

Hey Michael,

Yeah, having a related articles in the internal pages of your website that relate to your main keyword will help your home page rank faster and easier for you main keyword. What would be also good is if you insert a link inside some of your articles linking to your homepage using your main keyword as anchor text.

Nik

[Infinity]

And I think posts can work better than pages for you because they belong to categories which improves the structure of your blog. And also, it can be good with regards to the permalink structure.

[vij]

If you are not going to have lots of content then pages will be better. Posts creates too many copies on the website.

[Jack]

I use all-in-one-seo to exclude the tag, category, and archives from being indexed. That solves the problem of having duplicate content.

(03-30-2011 05:39 AM)vij Wrote:  If you are not going to have lots of content then pages will be better. Posts creates too many copies on the website.

[mpw45233]

(04-01-2011 07:29 AM)PartainSr Wrote:  I use all-in-one-seo to exclude the tag, category, and archives from being indexed. That solves the problem of having duplicate content.

Quick follow up question.

I am using all in one seo to make sure tag, category, and archives aren't being indexed, but I found some really cool options in my theme that might fix the problem also. It's like Evermore, but with more options.

When choosing how your posts are displayed, there are 4 options:
-Display full content
-Display excerpt-you can pick how many characters to display
-Display list
-Display tiles

You can choose a different display option for each of the following page types:
-Posts page
-Category page
-Tag page
-Archives
-Author page
-Search page

Would choosing a combination of the excerpt, list, or tile display options for the above page options solve the duplicate content issues? If so, it seems like it may be beneficial to let the tags, categories, and archives be indexed.

And what about the author page? The author page got indexed on one of my websites. And there's no option to exclude it in all in one seo.

Right now my posts are accessible from a dropdown in the header. Click the category you want, and it displays the posts as full content, excerpt, list, or tile.

I'm happy having my posts accessible from the category menu, and my homepage is a static page. But would having a posts (blog) page give me any seo benefits?

Thanks again for all the help.

[markyman]

My highest earning site is made up of 5 posts, doesn't even have a static homepage. Surprisingly, Google is ranking it high on the first page eventhough I haven't done much backlinks to it (actually, the only backlinks done here is from a $1 trial I got from WF way, way back).

My first site is made up of 30 pages, no posts. It is earning but not much. But again, it could just be that I picked a lousy niche (tattoo) and admittedly, the content is not that good. Several of my pages are on first page.

Anyway, it seems that both work in terms of seo.

[mpw45233]

Just a quick follow up question. My homepage is static, I don't have a blog (posts) page. My posts are only accessible through the categories (sidebar widget and header dropdown)

I have the category pages set to just display an excerpt of each post. I'm using All in One SEO by the way. Can I uncheck the no index option for categories? I still will have tags, archives, set to no index. And I have tags and archives set to display a list of posts as a backup.

This wouldn't create a duplicate content issue would it? The full post exists at only 1 url (the actual post url) Is this correct?

It seems like it would be beneficial to have these in the index.

And what about the Author page? I don't see an option to no index the Author page. Under my old setup, an author page was indexed with the full content of the posts.