How to structure pillar/skyscraper content

Hey all,

I am currently looking at some old content I wrote before I knew anything about SEO. I have a guide about what you might call the 'central topic' in my niche. It's divided up into four areas and each one has a roughly 2000-word article attached. I guess an 8000-word page is a nightmare for the reader and also bad SEO so I wanted to know what would be best to do with this?

• Option one: Cutting 500 words from each of the pages before merging everything and then making new pages with some of the cut content. I.e. having a 6000 word page and a bunch of pages bunching off from that.
• Option two: Keep things as they are now while still creating extra pages. I.e. 4x2000 word pages with pages branching off from the side.

My worry with option one is that 6000 words is still a lot, but it would be much neater than having the 4x2000.

Love to know what you would do with this situation

a... First of all, do any of those 4 pages rank anywhere? Because if they rank and you are happy with the rankings (and especially if you've gotten those ranking with hard work and monetary investment) I would not touch a thing.

Of course, you can restructure your site after it ranks and still regain your rankings after some time, but restructuring + regaining the rankings usually involves 301 redirects (which most newbies hate messing with because it's risky, if you misplace even a single dot your rankings will be done with).

b... If you're not ranking, well you can do whatever you want with the site then, and it's actually a good idea to restructure it now when your site is new and doesn't have a lot of content than doing it later and having to create 100s of new URLs and 301 the old ones to the new ones. That's something that I would never do again, I tried it once 8 years ago and I dreaded every moment of it

c... 2k words is not a lot if the keyword you're targeting with that content necessitates a lot of explanation. Google loves seeing topics covered in-depth, so if those 4 articles target keywords like "Top 10 Whatever...", or "Guide to Whatever..." then 2k words will be justified and might even be needed, so don't break that content down into smaller chunks.

Of course, if you target keywords like "do cobras eat hamsters?", or "where can I buy GTA 5?" or other long tail keywords like these then 2k words is overkill.

These are some general guidelines, and they might, or might not be helpful to you, but that's because we don't know the full story of your site (niche, keywords targeted with the 4 articles, how your site is structured, which categories you target, etc.) ... But don't make this data public here, it's not a good thing for millions of people (including google employees who watch this forum like hawks to catch newbies who brag about building links, so they can deindex their sites) seeing what keywords you're after so they can steal them from you.

follow

Perfect. Thank you for the advice. I am going to get rewriting over the weekend.

Thanks again