Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Posts vs Pages and Rankings Differ Greatly
-
I use wordpress for most of my sites and generally have a post 'news' section. What I've noticed is that just about every time a post will always rank much higher and much faster than a 'page'.
As long as I don't let it get buried in the news archives it continues to rank well, better than if I were to create a 'page'.
Is there any sort of reason this might occur? I'd like to be able to just create 'pages' but at this point in time it makes no sense.
-
Lots of my news posts were announcements of a much more detailed article that was posted on a "page" of my site. Because my blog got eight to ten posts per day the post pages would be quickly buried deep in the blog. The article pages were evergreen content. So, I would redirect those posts to the article page. I thought that it helped rankings.
I don't consider it blackhat because the newsy nature of the posts made them of "temporary value". We deleted and redirected thousands of post per year.
-
Right. I was just thinking and I don't know if this is blackhat but because the news posts always rank better than pages, I'm going to test 301 redirecting a news post to a new page and see what happens.
Normally I would just leave it be, but I would like to set up navigational columns within these posts and can not do so because of their structure.
Basically: Make a news post => let it rank for a week => 301 it to its permanent 'page' home.
This is not something I would normally do except for somewhat aged sites where not much new static content is added...
-
Up until about six months ago I had a blog that was focused on news content. The blog got several posts per day of very fresh news. New posts on that blog would be indexed within moments and land on the first page of google - sometimes in difficult SERPs. The rankings would stick for a while - not more than 24 to 48 hours and then quickly slip down the SERPs and disappear.
My guess is that google recognized the "newsy" nature of that blog (lots of queries with "news" as the keyword) and would give that blog short-term good rankings for queries that were getting a surge in volume. Again, that is a guess. But I saw the same treatment that you described.
-
EGOL - Any way to tell google that for the 'pages'.
Or, do they just categorize 'posts' to deserve this and rank higher even if they don't deserve the freshness/news boost?
-
This could be cause by "query deserves freshness".
-
Hi guys, thanks for the input.
Sean - The url structure is the same, except for it is in a /news/ folder and I tend to leave the path the same as the page title (for whatever reason that actually helps it even if its long). But not using any time sensitive permalinks on any of the sites.
Sha - I definitely hear what you're saying, when we are the first to post about something it definitely continues to rank highly even after the competition comes in. The thing is, we could put up a 'page' and it wouldn't.
Just seems to make no sense how google treats posts vs pages whether they're in G news or not. I haven't tried it, but I'm pretty sure I could just post a 'post' with no content and it would rank good whereas a 'page' wouldn't get indexed likely.
-
Hi GYMSN,
The most obvious explanation would be the content itself.
If you are following the general idea that pages are for "evergreen" content and posts are for "news", then it follows that the content in your posts tends to be much more topical than that in your pages.
If the content happens to also be timely (appears before others), fresh (up-to-date) and well written/good quality, then it should rank well and may even have a little potential for virality if very topical.
This would easily explain a significant difference in rankings.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
How are your permalinks setup? Posts typically have a dated url structure which could add to their freshness for the site. It is also argued one of the things you should do with post permalinks is move away from that url structure if you want your post urls to rank for a period of time.
Outside of that it really has to do with the site. Are posts given any better visibility from an internal linking standpoint? Are their technical aspects different? title tags, h1 tags etc?
You need to write out every different aspect down and start thinking of what it can be.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
At what point to stop comments on a blog? Do too many comments hurt the page?
I have a page that's ranking pretty well, and driving sales. That page is starting to get 10+ comments per day and is starting to get quite long. I was wondering if there is a point where I should disable the comments? My gut tells me that people interacting with the page, and Google seeing responses with the users SHOULD be a good thing not bad. But, then I think that a majority of the content of the page is no longer the article, but the comments. All the comments are good, non spammy and directly related to the topic. People just asking questions, etc. Good engagement, I should be happy right?
Content Development | | DemiGR0 -
How Are You Handling Blog Posts/Author Pages when Employees Leave the Company?
What do you believe to be the best approach in handling blog content for employees once they have left the company? We don’t want to remove the blog posts so they need to stay, but then there are the author pages. This gets tricky because the CMS ties the blog post to the author. One approach might be to change the author’s name to the Company’s name to get around author pages for people no longer with the company. It’s kind of tricky because the blog posts won’t have the same credibility if they don’t have a person’s name/photo associated with the post. We could leave the blogger’s page and list him as a “Contributing Author” once he’s left the company. Thoughts?
Content Development | | RosemaryB0 -
Can I post my MailChimp articles on my blog without getting hit for duplicate content?
I would like to post my newsletters on my blog, but am afraid of duplicate content since you can click a link on the MailChimp email blast to view the Newsletter online. Is this considered dup content?
Content Development | | RoxBrock0 -
Does every keyword need its own landing page?
So we're doing a bunch of keyword research. We've identified the big traffic, higher competition keywords and we've identified tons (thousands) of long-tail keywords that would be appropriate. What I'm wondering is: does every keyword need its own landing page (or content page)? Obviously, we'll be building content for all the primary keywords we're targeting. I'm less mystified about that. What I'm more confused about is what to do about the long tail keywords. For there to be any measurable traffic increase, we need to rank well for thousands of long tail keywords. But it's just not realistic to create thousands of quality content pieces to target each of these long tail keywords individually. So how do you go about ranking for large numbers of long tail keywords? I saw somebody post about using an FAQ page to target multiple long tail keywords which makes sense but even with that I'm not going to have a thousand questions. How does one go after large volumes of long tail keywords? Thanks, --eric
Content Development | | EricOliver0 -
How many words should be placed on a home page, category pages, and product pages?
To optimize content for a website, how many words should be provided for a home page, category page and a product page?
Content Development | | gallreddy0 -
Changing the author of a post
Hi, I've a number of wordpress posts that were written by different authors, and I want to merge them into a single author. If Google sees that originally the post was rel authored to person A and later we change the author reference to person B, will Google see this as suspicious in any way? Or does it not matter, as long as it's only attributed to a single author at any one time? Thanks, Leigh
Content Development | | Leighm0 -
Wordpress Duplicate Pages/ URL's - Help !
Hi guys, I have been running SEOMoz for just over a month and slowly cleaning up one of my Wordpress Blogs. While going through the crawl reports I have noticed that I have duplicate pages showing on the crawl. For example, the main post would be; www.xxxxx.com/blog/post-title Then I see another URL which would be; **www.xxxx.com/blog/page/59 ** When I click on either URL it goes back to the actual post title URL. What's with these page URL's ? Isn't these two URL's showing duplicate content to the search engines ? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Content Development | | dcc0 -
Simple question: How many words optimal for blog posts
Hello, We're adding a blog to one of our sites. How many words should be in a blog post for it to be optimal for the search engines? If it varies from industry to industry, please give a couple of examples. We were going to do 500 words but that seems a bit long. Thanks!
Content Development | | BobGW0