Are Archives pages THAT Important?

People who have been following Blog Madness may have noticed that I assign a great deal of value to archive pages. Because I have an Archives category and a Usability and Navigation category, many sites get penalized twice for not having an archive page. Is an archive page really that important? YES!

Over the past six months, my archive page poewar.com/articles/ has been the second most accessed page on my site. It trails only my home page in hits, and it doesn’t trail it by much. More importantly, the archive page is the primary access point to the rest of my site. Most of my articles get more traffic from that internal page than from the rest of the web combined. My archive page has received over 75,000 hits in the past six months from StumbleUpon alone. Those are hits generated because the StumbleUpon users have recommended the page to the other users. Clearly they think there is value there.

When I visit a blog, the archive page is the first page I look for because I want to see the blogger’s best work as well as the blogger’s recent work. If you write a great article and nobody sees it after it leaves your home page, you are penalizing your best work. Take the time to create an archive page, even if it is just a list of your top ten articles. Trust me, you will see a difference in your traffic and you will have more satisfied readers.

Related links

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