Merging two pages into one - bad seo done previously
-
Hi,
I have two pages
Page 1
/stop-smoking-hypnotherapy.php
Page authority: 24and
Page 2
/stop-smoking-in-highgate-north-london-radlett-hertfordshire-and-city-of-london.php
Page authority: 13 with 2 internal links onlyThis was probably done to get more local searches to the page but i think it is a bit spamy.
Would it be better to 301 page 2 to page 1 or make it as a blog post and keep it alive?
-
Hi Syed,
I definitely agree that the second URL looks too spammy - especially because some of those areas of London are nowhere near each other (Hertfordshire is about an hour away from the "City of London" - an area in East London - and the demographics of each area are astoundingly different!).
Without having seen the pages live, I would probably 301 the second page with the longer URL to the first page, or break out the services offered in different parts of the area to showcase people working in Hertfordshire, the City, etc. If there was enough original content, you could have a page for different areas. My guess is that there is no difference, however, or that there would not be enough different information to justify regional pages - that the page is for one business targeting multiple areas. If so, go with the redirection option.
-
My feeling based on looking at the titles is that the pages have at least someone different content. I would think the company was trying to target some area based keywords somewhere on page 2. Does that page get targeted traffic based on those keywords? If so I would keep it alive, as a blog post if you wish, as redirecting it would lose that traffic. If it gets no traffic and is not successfully targeting any long tail keywords then just update the internal links and redirect it to page 1.
-
The page 2 URL looks spammy, and if it provide the same kind of content as on page 1, then I would agree that 301ing page 2 is a good option.
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
-
Loss of search visibility-consecutive drops in one month - something I did or competitors?
I am fairly new to Moz. I co-manage a national website with about 400 common pages and separate location areas for cities in Australia. 1 city starting their own separate website a year ago. A drop in search visibility of the whole national site and my location page started in mid July according to Moz stats.- 8%>12%>$38% consecutive drops per week. In google analytics the organic search has dropped 8% overall & 2% on my location page in last month. I did minor optimisation to the my page and articles using Moz in July - upped H2 to H1 title, tweaked main keyword, wrote slightly different SEO title and included keywords in body copy. The rankings of the target keywords went up but other keyword rankings went down. The other thing that started in June was Facebook advertising of our blog articles (click-throughs have a high bounce rate of 95%). The office with its own website (with a similar brand name) also started doing Facebook advertising and SEO for it earlier this year. I can see their own website traffic really shot up in June/July, and they also maintained their traffic on the national site. Wondering if any of these are causing the drop, or if this is more an indicator of competitor activity or alogorthms? Any ideas about causes and solutions appreciated.
Local Website Optimization | | SueMclean0 -
What's the best SEO solution for international targeting of different english speaking countries?
Hi guys, recently won a client who operates globally, their domain is .com and their head office is in the UK. They have built regional sub-directories and translated content and pages of their site for /ru, /fr etc. The issue comes with their /us and /ca pages. This content for the most part is identical to the main .com site. The content is still in English and can't in most situations be changed to be more localised, so there are duplicate content issues. Trying to think of options: Ensure hreflang is added properly, build regional links to regional pages, get local contact details / NAP on all regional pages, set up Google business listings for each regional office and link accordingly. Will Google be able to identify these regional pages as more suitable search results for US searches? Make the main .com version of the content the canonical, which takes away any ranking benefits of the regional pages altogether, but removes the duplicate content issues and means we can focus link building and content resources into making sure the .com version of the page ranks well. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | SamFanatic0 -
Local SEO + Searcher Intent Targeting for Home Builder
Good Morning, All! I work for a home builder - www.HibbsHomes.com. Their site has hundreds of pages and blogs and I'm looking at consolidating many of them as they're older and use an older SEO strategy. Can you take a look at their portfolio? http://hibbshomes.com/custom-home-builders-st-louis/st-louis-custom-homes-portfolio/ I'm wondering if I should consolidate the various projects into their own pages by house type and city - rather than having all on one page? Both for SEO and for easier searchability. How would you organize this for these? The benefit to setting up city pages is the local SEO rank (St Louis has so many suburbs). The benefit to setting up pages by home style or size would be for user experience. How do I improve this for both? And... how do I optimize for conversions better?
Local Website Optimization | | stldanni1 -
Hreflang errors "no return tag" sitemap.xml , and local search landing page with wrong Languages
Really need help , our website when search in google(US) will provide global page (keyword:asus/asus zenfone3). and search console also return "no return tags"another wear thing is when use googlebot crawl sitemap.xml googlebot cannot finish the file less than a quarterCan you please advise on what needs to be edited or changed to make sure my implementation is correct and not returning errors?
Local Website Optimization | | June01270 -
Local SEO Best Practise?
We are planning to localize our website by launching CCTLD. But there is a little confusion about some aspects, which are: Should we track location and take our visitors to their native domain? Or do we need to take our visitors to .com domain and show a Popup, if they want to visit the native region website? What is the best case study for localization?
Local Website Optimization | | UmairGadit0 -
Improving SEO with no blog
I have a client who understands the value of content for SEO - however getting them to provide some content has proven an impossible task. I've tried every way to make it easy for them. I've offered to come over to their office myself and see if I can just take 15 minutes of their time and record their answers to a few questions. The response is that's a great idea, we'll set up a time...and no time is ever good. So I've thought, what can I do without them? Unfortunately, their industry is so technical and so niche I'd need to have a law degree to even begin to understand exactly what they do, and as they are in law it's probably better to have no content than content with something even slightly incorrect in it. For now, all I can do is summarize and share news from a government website to their social media accounts. It's not highly effective. Their on-page SEO for the main site is completely optimized. I've placed them in every free listing I can possibly find - both industry and local sites. I have them update me on any local events, conferences and/or trade shows they attend for possible backlinks. What else can I do? I suppose I fear that if I can't provide them any additional results, they will stop seeing the value in SEO services, and I'd have a hard time disagreeing as I can't think of what else to do for them. Thanks for any help!
Local Website Optimization | | everestagency1 -
Call Tracking, DNI Script & Local SEO
Hi Moz! I've been reading about this a lot more lately - and it doesn't seem like there's exactly a method that Google (or other search engines) would consider to be "best practices". The closest I've come to getting some clarity are these Blumenthals articles - http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/05/14/a-guide-to-call-tracking-and-local/ & the follow-up piece from CallRail - http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/11/25/guide-to-using-call-tracking-for-local-search/. Assuming a similar goal of using an existing phone number with a solid foundation in the local search ecosystem, and to create the ability to track how many calls are coming organically (not PPC or other paid platform) to the business directly from the website for an average SMB. For now, let's also assume we're also not interested in screening the calls, or evaluating customer interaction with the staff - I would love to hear from anyone who has implemented the DNI call tracking info for a website. Were there negative effects on Local SEO? Did the value of the information (# of calls/month) outweigh any local search conflicts? If I was deploying this today, it seems like the blueprint for including DNI script, while mitigating risk for losing local search visibility might go something like this: Hire reputable call-tracking service, ensure DNI will match geographic area-code & be "clean" numbers Insert DNI script on key pages on site Maintain original phone number (non-DNI) on footer, within Schema & on Contact page of the site ?? Profit Ok, those last 2 bullet points aren't as important, but I would be curious where other marketers land on this issue, as I think there's not a general consensus at this point. Thanks everyone!
Local Website Optimization | | Etna1 -
Home page links -- Ajax When Too Many?
My home page has links to major cities. If someone chooses a specific city I want to give them the choice to choose a suburb within the city, With say 50 cities and 50 suburbs for each city that's 2500 links on the home page. In order to avoid that many links on the home page (or any page) I would like to have just the 50 cities and pull up the suburbs as an ajax call that search engines would not read/crawl. This would be better than clicking on a main city and then getting the city page which they then can choose a suburb. Better to do it all at once. Is it a bad idea to ajax the subregions on the home page and to code it so Google, Bing, other search engines don't crawl or even see anything on the home page related to the suburbs? The search engines will still find the suburb links because they will be listed on each main city page.
Local Website Optimization | | friendoffood0