Hi Barry. Would you suggest topic pages have some unique content on there? E.g. 'Here's everything we've written about film star-turned-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger'?
Hi Jon, great question. I don't think it's necessary to have text content on a topic page (such as a bio or summary of the topic), but it may help in Google's understanding of the page as a topic page. Usually the topic page's headline and <title> tag are sufficient, but if you have the ability to add some more text and provide further clarity, then it certainly won't hurt.
💯 agree. Also who has the resources to add copy to each and every topic page, however one such topic page that is done very well with copy and internal links is this one
Hi Barry and others, how long should the content on tag pages be? Can it be too long or too short (for instance, is 150 words OK?). This content on Hello Magazine about Kate Middleton is fairly short.. And also one more question, is it better if it's a biography or - like in the case of Kate Middleton - more of a description of what you get: "See all the latest news, pictures, beauty..."
Tag pages don't actually need a lot of intro content. Their main purpose is to collect articles associated with a topic. As long as they have a strong <h1> headline that defines the tag, intro copy is optional. Though it does help if you have some content, it could be a lot of work to do this for all your tag pages.
If you can add content, try to make it useful and relevant to the tag topic. Not just 'See the latest news...' etc, but a bio and some background and context is definitely helpful to make it a better tag page.
Regarding the tags placed at the bottom of an article. If l have a tag “Car Insurance” pointing to a news category page - do you think the anchor text from the tag could confuse Google on what the “product” page is on the site vs the “news hub”?
Would it be better to call the tag “Car Insurance News” to prevent any confusion?
Good question Max. If your website mixes commercial car insurance pages with news sections about car insurance, you're best to be very explicit about what is news and what is commercial - so yes I'd call that topic page 'Car Insurance News'.
Having said that, in my experience websites that mix news with commercial pages (i.e. websites that aren't pure 100% news/informational content) tend not to perform well in Google's news ecosystem. Often, those sorts of sites don't get any foothold at all in Top Stories and Google News.
It's why I recommend separate sites for news content versus commercial content. So if you have an insurance website that sells insurance, your news section is best spun off as a separate news site with no sales pages at all.
This was an excellent read. I was especially interested in the AMP discussion as I've hated the setup. I'm going to remove it for a month and see what happens.
"Simply stated, if your top navigation (both first-level and contextual subnavigation) contains links to a topic page, you probably don’t need to link to that topic page from within articles."
I think this is my biggest question - how much you can scale these links out on more niche publishers?
On News publishers covering stories, the entity coverage is so broad that you can't fit all entities in the Navigation, so you're forced to build constant ongoing links within the content, and embrace Tags.
On a smaller niche publishing sites I've worked on, most categories and larger entities are represented in the Nav as traditional category pages or topic hubs. In that case, most smaller entity types of keywords probably have dedicated articles instead of Topic archives, so it feels like a bit of the Topic page opportunity disappears. Unless of course, incremental links in the body copy might be valued higher (or analyzed differently) than the sitewide navigation links.
Would love to know if you agree the opportunity gets discounted on a more specific publisher or not? Or if publisher covers all entities in Nav, if you'd skip the hub links focus altogether?
Excellent overview of internal links and how to use them. There is a camp in the SEO industry that believes tag & category pages are a waste of crawl budget. Not so for News sites.
Hi Barry. Would you suggest topic pages have some unique content on there? E.g. 'Here's everything we've written about film star-turned-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger'?
Hi Jon, great question. I don't think it's necessary to have text content on a topic page (such as a bio or summary of the topic), but it may help in Google's understanding of the page as a topic page. Usually the topic page's headline and <title> tag are sufficient, but if you have the ability to add some more text and provide further clarity, then it certainly won't hurt.
💯 agree. Also who has the resources to add copy to each and every topic page, however one such topic page that is done very well with copy and internal links is this one
https://www.hellomagazine.com/tags/kate-middleton/
I guess it comes down to search demand and then internal resources.
Hi Barry and others, how long should the content on tag pages be? Can it be too long or too short (for instance, is 150 words OK?). This content on Hello Magazine about Kate Middleton is fairly short.. And also one more question, is it better if it's a biography or - like in the case of Kate Middleton - more of a description of what you get: "See all the latest news, pictures, beauty..."
Tag pages don't actually need a lot of intro content. Their main purpose is to collect articles associated with a topic. As long as they have a strong <h1> headline that defines the tag, intro copy is optional. Though it does help if you have some content, it could be a lot of work to do this for all your tag pages.
If you can add content, try to make it useful and relevant to the tag topic. Not just 'See the latest news...' etc, but a bio and some background and context is definitely helpful to make it a better tag page.
It makes sense, yeah. Thank you very much for your answer and useful content you have on your website
Hi Barry. Great article, thanks for sharing.
Regarding the tags placed at the bottom of an article. If l have a tag “Car Insurance” pointing to a news category page - do you think the anchor text from the tag could confuse Google on what the “product” page is on the site vs the “news hub”?
Would it be better to call the tag “Car Insurance News” to prevent any confusion?
Good question Max. If your website mixes commercial car insurance pages with news sections about car insurance, you're best to be very explicit about what is news and what is commercial - so yes I'd call that topic page 'Car Insurance News'.
Having said that, in my experience websites that mix news with commercial pages (i.e. websites that aren't pure 100% news/informational content) tend not to perform well in Google's news ecosystem. Often, those sorts of sites don't get any foothold at all in Top Stories and Google News.
It's why I recommend separate sites for news content versus commercial content. So if you have an insurance website that sells insurance, your news section is best spun off as a separate news site with no sales pages at all.
that’s an amazing article
This was an excellent read. I was especially interested in the AMP discussion as I've hated the setup. I'm going to remove it for a month and see what happens.
"Simply stated, if your top navigation (both first-level and contextual subnavigation) contains links to a topic page, you probably don’t need to link to that topic page from within articles."
I think this is my biggest question - how much you can scale these links out on more niche publishers?
On News publishers covering stories, the entity coverage is so broad that you can't fit all entities in the Navigation, so you're forced to build constant ongoing links within the content, and embrace Tags.
On a smaller niche publishing sites I've worked on, most categories and larger entities are represented in the Nav as traditional category pages or topic hubs. In that case, most smaller entity types of keywords probably have dedicated articles instead of Topic archives, so it feels like a bit of the Topic page opportunity disappears. Unless of course, incremental links in the body copy might be valued higher (or analyzed differently) than the sitewide navigation links.
Would love to know if you agree the opportunity gets discounted on a more specific publisher or not? Or if publisher covers all entities in Nav, if you'd skip the hub links focus altogether?
Great article, thanks Barry. What are your thoughts on how this could be applied to ecommerce sites? Category pages instead of topic hubs?
Hey Barry. Great article. Could you possibly expand it with a paragraph about anchor texts and their ratio (exact match, naked, partial match...)
As always, great!
Internal linking need custom anchor text strategy based on long tail keywords
Excellent overview of internal links and how to use them. There is a camp in the SEO industry that believes tag & category pages are a waste of crawl budget. Not so for News sites.