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SEO Case Study: Press Release Archives
June 05, 2007
We recently worked on the press release archive for a pretty large company and I wanted to show an informal case study about what happened.
Here's the initial structure:
Each of the smallest document icons represents a specific press release. The issues with this architecture are fairly obvious when displayed graphically. It's a linear linking format, with the main press page showing the most current releases. You need to click a "next" button to hit a page linking to releases 11-20, 21-30, etc. etc. So the oldest releases were literally dozens of clicks away from the home page.
With this setup, here are the baseline stats. I can't use real numbers, but I'm hopeful that your algebra knowledge is current enough that variables will suffice:
- Total releases indexed: X (representing about 6% of total possible pages)
- Search traffic (monthly visits from search engines where the landing page is a press release): ~Y visits / month
Here's the modified structure:
The main press page now has child pages devoted to releases from specific years, as well as pages devoted to releases based on their subject area. Consequently, each release has links from at least two internal pages, and no release is further away from the home page than 3 clicks.
Stats 45 days after implementation:
- Total releases indexed: 16.8X (representing >98% of total possible press releases)
- Search traffic (monthly visits from search engines where the landing page is a press release): ~2.4Y visits / month
A couple important notes:
Don't fool yourself. This is content that people actually search for in pretty significant numbers. If you write press releases just to write press releases -- and your content doesn't have the pent-up demand to justify it -- don't expect results like these. Jill Whalen wrote a smart article about this very topic at Search Engine Land.
Sitemaps aren't a back door. For 6+ months prior to the change implementation, all press release files were included in a Google XML sitemap file. So don't expect a sitemap feed to dramatically increase your indexing if your site's architecture doesn't back it up.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at June 5, 2007 03:50 PM
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Comments
Excellent post Erik!
Did the change in architecture of the archives allow you to improve the anchor text of the links? And if so, do you think this played a bigger part in the improvement than the distance of each press release from the home page?
Really awesome job with the blog everyone! I don't read it for a while then I come back and find tons of new great content. Kudos and thanks.
--DW
Posted by: Derrick Wheeler at July 10, 2007 12:04 AM