Thought I would share this

by 16 replies
19
Someone gave me a link about article length and SEO value. I found it very interesting, and quite informative. So I thought I would share it. I can't say anything as good as this post does, so I will shut up and share te link.

How Content Length Affects Rankings and Conversions
#search engine optimization #share #thought
  • A good to see you around these parts Tim.

    Are you freelancing SEO for Neil Patel? Nice..

    I always wondered about this chart they used.

    .

    How exactly they where able to extract only the article text from so many pages? With so many different CSS I would think you could only parse the full html version of each page. And that figure would add up to a larger number of alphabetical characters found and counted as "words" on a page.

    With parsing a pages content.

    If you take Senuke for example. That program needed to be coded how to only extract the articles from Ezinearticles etc...

    I'm unsure how this case study achieved it. There's all sorts of text on a page that could be counted.

    FYI I like big articles. 2000 words+
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  • Oh its pretty straight forward to parse the body away from the footer, sidebar, navigation, etc.

    There's cook-your-own parsing scripts out there that will get the job done as well.

    Anything that can be rendered by a browser can be rendered and isolated by a script... and I'm assuming it would be a linux script for the sake of speed.

    There's 'pointy clicky' windows programs that can do it out of the box as well.

    Consider how screamingfrog works as an example of functionality for instance.
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    • Yeah, so wheres the data from that in their post? Giving citation to the "how".

      I bow to your almightiness on this one, its not my bag.

      I know alot of tools can easily pull out say "Titles" and things like that.

      Those numbers just look way high to me, as an average joe interwebs surfer.
  • No bowing needed, just talking shop.

    I didn't bother to read the article, I was just trying to discuss the question you raised. Not debate mind you, just talk about it while I sip on my 'beverage.'

    If their numbers are high... they should hire a blackhat to figure this shit out for them, lol.

    But like I said, a debate or questioning and arguing were literally the last thing on my mind.
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    • I think you read me wrong, I wasn't arguing. Maybe the "Yeah" at the beginning was forward. Anyway no I'm not arguing, they where real questions. More directed at quicksprout then you really.
  • Be careful, Neil is a god to whitehats.

    In all seriousness, I follow him on twitter. 75-80% of his stuff is worth reading for insight, despite some inaccuracies.
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  • They work together on another project IIRC but I don't remember the name....

    But yeah, they're closely related in terms of what they do.
  • Yes I wondered about their accuracy. But I thought it might be interesting to see how others viewed it. That is why I bring it here. And sometimes when I do this, I get some serious minds contributing to the dissuasion. I appreciate that.
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    • Me too. I've seen Quicksprout / Neil Patel stuff that's wrong from the premise, and at the end of the story they're completely lost in the la la land. (Might've been about "social signals". If I remember correctly he's a believer in that mythos.)

      However, most of his content seems to be fairly good, and I'm following him via newsletter. The article you posted seems solid.

      You could use very basic tools like wget to get all the articles, and a PHP CLI or a shell script to extract the correct part and count the words. You just need to identify the container that has the article text in it. In Quicksprout's case it's probably div#container. To extract the part of HTML you can write a bit of regex code or get one of the ready-made libraries.

      I usually do this from the Mac command line, or use a server if it needs to run for a while.
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  • Well thanks for bringing it here.

    The name is familiar... do we know each other from other parts of the industry tim?
  • I doubt we know each other from anywhere but Warrior Forum. I have seen you, and you have probably seen me. I seem to be a bit of a big mouth.
  • Ahh, we were separated a birth. That explains it.
  • A very informative article you share here. I do agree about content is king. But too lengthy content is not goos also. I usually will break all the lengthy informative articles into several parts.
  • Banned
    No personal flames but that OP link/article logic is severely flawed, I can prove it with my own sites.

    I have download sites, all my pages are very similar as far as on-page text. Out of a few thousand downloadable files (pages) I have a few that traffic just goes crazy building links on their own. Keep in mind all those thousands of pages are very similar but there's just something about a few of the files (content) that traffic eats up (AKA: building organic links).

    My best content page has 12 words of plain text excluding the header/sidebar/footer. The majority of other pages on my same niche sites is similar in word count per internal page.

    My point is, counting text is ridiculous for SEO. I can only imagine unwitting people reading that article & thinking they'll blast their pages with text & rank for keywords like auto insurance. That will show progressive.com who's boss! :rolleyes:

    Don't get me wrong, having more keywords per page can help that single page rank for a variety of keywords but it's far easier to focus on one keyword per page than dozens of keywords per page.

    Believe it or not, the internet doesn't revolve around articles, neither does SEO. Being active in a niche as an end user can help make decisions like the amount of content per page. Example, If I'm shopping for Nike shoes, I don't care who created the business, I also don't care about G+, Likes, Views, etc... all I care about is do they have my shoe size/style & are the shoes shipping today.

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  • 19

    Someone gave me a link about article length and SEO value. I found it very interesting, and quite informative. So I thought I would share it. I can't say anything as good as this post does, so I will shut up and share te link. How Content Length Affects Rankings and Conversions