Google explains how it sees pages vs. posts

You have a great idea for a new content piece.  But you are not sure if this should be a page or a post.

Sounds familiar?

There are many factors that should be considered when deciding whether something should exist on a page or a post, but SEO isn’t really one of those factors.  It shouldn’t be, at least.

This was recently also confirmed by Google’s John Mueller. During a recent weekly SEO hangout video, John confirmed that Google does not really differentiate between pages and posts when it comes to ranking.

A page can rank just as well as a post, and vice versa.

“I don’t think Googlebot would recognize that there’s a difference. So, usually, that difference between posts and pages is something that is more within your backend within the CMS that you’re using, within WordPress in that case. And it wouldn’t be something that would be visible to us.

So we would look at these as if it’s an HTML page and there’s lots of content here, and it’s linked within your website in this way, and based on that, we would rank this HTML page.

We would not say, oh, it’s a blog post, or it’s a page, or it’s an informational article. We would essentially say it’s an HTML page and there’s this content here, and it’s interlinked within your website in this specific way.” — John Mueller, Google.

Having said that, you may notice pages on your site consistently outranking posts. One of the big reasons for that could be how the internal and external links are set up.

If most of the links point to pages — instead of posts — Google will likely think that pages are more important on your website and, therefore, should be prioritized on the SERPs.

In response to a specific question about this, John said the following:

“I don’t know your website, so it’s hard to say. But what might be happening is that the internal linking of your website is different, for the blog section as for the services section or the other parts of your website.

And if the internal linking is very different then it’s possible that we would not be able to understand that this is an important part of the website.

It’s not tied to the URLs; it’s not tied to the type of page. It’s really like we don’t understand how important this part of the website is.”

Conclusion

The takeaway here is that SEO and potential rankings should not be a concern when it comes to deciding between pages vs. posts.

And if, for example, pages are outranking posts on your site, it is most likely because of how more and better links point to pages on your site.

You can watch the full discussion in this video.

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