A new study highlights the fact that blogs are usually not the best choices for positioning yourself high on page 1 of Google, primarily if you publish quality content.
WordPress would power one in three sites in the world.
The ease of installation and use of this CMS has made it the content management system of choice for many companies wishing to set up an online website. But even if WordPress allows many possibilities, many of them keep the blog format, also if it is not always adapted to their purpose. That is the observation made by Perficient Digital in its latest study, which looked at a panel of 100 blogs crawled entirely for the occasion.
First, Perficient Digital looks at the percentage of pages in these spaces that are blog posts. In 54% of cases, more than 30% of the pages are not blog posts. It can be pagination, comments, tags. But overall, content that is not very useful for indexing on search engines.
The depth of pages and the number of clicks matters.
SEO recommendations generally talk about a maximum depth of 5 clicks from home to get to the pages you want to see indexed on search engines. Beyond that, without external links, your pages will be invisible or almost invisible. On more than a million posts analyzed, less than 20% were 5 clicks or less from home when more than 30% were more than 20 clicks away.
By averaging the page depths of the various articles on the blogs, Perficient Digital indicates that 2/3 of the blogs examined have an average of more than 5.
The overall conclusion of the study highlights the wide gap between the structuring of sites, the types of content found on them, and their objectives. A vast majority of the articles concerned “evergreen” type content, in other words, cold, original, non-current, and intended to last over time.
The choice of a blog structure, therefore, makes no sense, because it reduces the weight of articles as time goes by, making them further from home and less accessible. If your objective is to create sustainable content to position yourself on Google, it is best to choose a content hub that is unique to you, whose structure you master and which will lower the page depth of the various articles that must remain visible over the long term. An essential element that you must think about before creating your site!
