Internal URLs competing for keyword

[rasmusbang]

I have an affiliate site where we have reviews of bookmakers, which are optimized for the bookmakers name as a key word. We have seen a drop in rankings and at this point we are out ranked by a lot of pages including our own.

We also have a community forum and write news and articles about the the bookmakers. The thing is, that these forum threads and articles often out rank our review pages, which are the pages we need people to land on in order to convert.

This page: http://www.betxpert.com/bookmakere/bet365 is optimized for "bet365" and is at this point outranked by http://www.betxpert.com/artikel/ny-funktion-hos-bet365-afslut-vaeddemaal-foer-tid.

This page actually links to the review.

What should i do in order to increase ranks for my pages?

Make the forum threads and articles crappy for the key word?

Would it help to add a canonical link to the articles?

Would it help to remove the meta tag for update time of the review, such that Google does not downrank for not being recent?

-Rasmus

[rasmusbang]

The menu is on ALL pages. Is this a problem?

I feel that the link is relevant for any new user coming to the site. Will not seem spammy, i think.

[Chris.Menke]

Often, a direct link  from the homepage can help the search visibility of the internal page being linked to (and others being linked to from that internal page).  Exact match anchor text in your internal links won't get you penalized like they can in external links but you want to be sure they don't look spammy to visitors.

[rasmusbang]

One follow up question.

A couple of years ago, i removed links to our reviews from our menu because i was afraid it would seem spammy. But as far as i can see, all the pages in our menu have good Page Authority. Would it be a good "trick" to put the bookmaker reviews back in the menu in order to give the pages more of the internal link juice?

-Rasmus

[rasmusbang]

Well, perhaps it is due to the affiliation with gambling. But, the pages outranking us, are also in affiliation with gambling.

Will try a little work towards link building and try to internally pass the link juice from the articles to the reviews.

Thank you for the replies!

[BlueprintMarketing]

I agree with everything Chris has said it's right on the money.

"Would it help to remove the meta tag for update time of the review, such that Google does not down rank for not being recent?"

Absolutely not it will make no difference whatsoever. Like Chris is explained Google is taking signals from many places however they are not going to be influenced or tricked by metadata tags.

It is possible because of your affiliation with gambling that Google is cracking down on that sort of site. However I could be wrong on that last one.

Sincerely,

Thomas

[Chris.Menke]

Rasmus,

You've got to build the value of the review pages in the eyes of your target audience.  If Google's not ranking them highly enough, it's because Google's not thinking they're important enough.  You have to take a really hard look at those pages as compared to those of the competitors that rank at the top of page one and come to terms with what's helping those pages rank well--it's probably links but could be discussion and engagement socially.

Today's SEO is less about the words you use on the page and more about how many people are showing that it's useful to them.  When you construct your reviews, you need to keep a laser focus on who the target audience member who will share your content and you have to give them a reason to share yours over the competitors'. It's like concept research, instead of the old fashioned keyword research--you have to conceive of content that has an audience --an audience you can reach out to socially---and which doesn't have so many competitors that you can't get a foothold in the mindshare of your intended audience.

I say that because to me, your review page appears kind of run-of-the-mill (though I can't read it) and that there might not be much there that gives the audience a reason to chose it over someone else's review.  It's time to beef up the content and then hit the social networks and bloggers to promote it.