301 Redirect to add juice from Keyword A to Keyword B
-
Here's our situation:
Our company sells Employee HANDBOOKS (the book that explains to employees how the company itself is run, more or less). That's the technically correct term for them. However, many people use this term interchangeably with Employee MANUALS. Employee MANUALS are actually slightly different. (they're more specific, usually a list of common office policies and procedures and how to do them)
When doing Keyword research, we learned that many, many people search for Employee MANUALS when they actually are interested in an employee HANDBOOK. We've got our page optimized for the Keyword Employee HANDBOOKS, because in our copy we always refer to it as such.
Here's my question: Would it be "cloacking" or some other blackhat nonsense if we did this:
#1. Take a copy of the current page, and make a second page for it with a slightly different URL, but optimize the SEO-relevant parts for the phrase Employee MANUAL.
#2. That page will also include a 301-redirect towards the original page, which is identical except the SEO bits are optimized for Employee HANDBOOKS.
My understanding here is that we'd get the SEO juice from the phrase Employee Manual, without actually having to do the upkeep on two different pages. We also avoid having to have a random page SEO optimized for an improper term just because of the general confusion about what the product is called.
Are we on the right track here? Or is this going to annoy Google, or not have the result I'm predicting? Any insight is appreciated!
-
Exactly this. Thanks Richard for explaining it in this way as well.
-
It looks like Google is aware of and has made this connection already. If you Google "employee manual" you will see that it actually bolds the term "handbook" as well. This usually indicates they can be used almost interchangeably in the content.
-
I would create the 301 redirect for the old pages to the most applicable new pages or home page, and create a custom 404. Those are always good to have and could also help explain the transition to your current strategy.
-
Fantastic, thank you sir. I've marked the question as answered and really appreciate your quick response. Could I trouble you for one more thing?
We'd already researched this, but since I may have failed to catch something important I want to make sure I'm not setting up a bad result.
We're currently migrating from one web design to another. It's all in WordPress but it's a new theme, templates, and all of that.
We have several links to content that is no longer particularly relevant or aligning with our current strategy. At first we felt it would be better to just not move them over, and design a friendly but generic 404 page that would alert people they may have tried to access something that's no longer there.
I suggested that instead of 404 (which I feel look bad, no matter how well they're designed) we should just transfer over the web page, but have them 301-redirect to our home page. I think that will be a slightly less jarring experience for them than seeing a 404 page. Either way, it will be a very small number of people who might still have access to a link for content so old/bad we don't really want it on our site anymore.
So in your opinion, is 404ing out or 301ing back to the home page the better option in our scenario? Or perhaps some third option I'm unaware of.
-
Right. Even though your business is technically about handbooks, doesn't mean you can't create some sort of campaign or widget or app or some sort of engagement piece that uses the term 'manual' instead and is targeted at individuals instead of corporate users.
You'll notice when you run some Google searches that they'll tag a result with synonyms as well as results missing certain precise search terms. This is due to the ability of Google to correlate meaning, intent, links, and more to such a high degree. The more you engage the higher you'll rank for both handbook and manual.
-
I'm not sure I followed your suggestion for an alternative, but thanks for your quick answer.
You're suggesting we simply try to obtain links to our site with anchor text mentioning both manuals and handbooks? I understand SEO value for the words in the anchor text will transfer that juice to the site it links to, but we are still in the process of building awareness, so a lot of our links back to our site are actually made by us. (When we submit content to various sites for them to post, we have the link to our site in the Author Bio section. When we post on social media, we're usually forced to use a bit.ly link due to Twitter character constraints.)
So if we advertise a "Free Handbook Review" program, we'd want to have SOME of the links back to our site have "manual" somewhere in the anchor text, in other words.
-
Hi Paul. Yes, this bit of work would be more gray/black than other straightforward methods, plus its benefits would be pretty minimal. What would be better is gaining links that use the terms interchangeably from outside sources. If people are searching for these terms as synonyms they will likely link in the same way. There would be several ways to go about this, like a "Make Your Manual" campaign that generates some links, PR around such, and so on. Cheers.
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
-
After you remove a 301 redirect that Google has processed, will the new URL retain any of the link equity from the old URL?
Lets say you 301 redirect URL A to URL B, and URL A has some backlinks from other sites. Say you left the 301 redirect in place for a year, and Google had already replaced the old URL with the new URL in the SERPs, would the new URL (B) retain some of the link equity from URL A after the 301 redirect was removed, or does the redirect have to remain in place forever?
Technical SEO | | johnwalkersmith0 -
How do you fix redirect chains and temporary redirects?
Hi, I have a lot of issues popping up with temporary redirects and redirect chains. I'm still confused as to what exactly redirect chains are and I don't know how to find where the "chains" are or how to fix them. I'm having two issues mainly:1. Temporary RedirectsI have around 100 pages on our www.twowayradiosfor.com website that are being flagged as temporary redirects. All of them have one thing in common: they are review pages (basically, when a customer clicks on the Review button to review a certain product, they are redirected to a review page for that product).URL Example: https://www.twowayradiosfor.com/reviewhelpful.asp?ProductCode=CLS1410-COMBO&ID=44&yes=noI went into our website and set any URL containing the following as noindex:/review.aspWill that fix the issue? If yes, will I also need to do that for any URL containing /reviewhelpful.asp?2. Redirect ChainsIt seems like basically every product page on my website has this issue (over 100 pages). Here's an example of one:https://www.twowayradiosfor.com/Motorola-CLS1110-p/cls1110.htmI don't see any broken links on this page or links that redirect to another page that redirects, etc. What is causing this? Is it something on my header bar that is redirecting (since that header bar appears on every page, maybe that is why this issue shows up on a lot of pages)?I am new to Moz and still trying to figure this stuff out. I really appreciate any help. Thanks, Sawyer
Technical SEO | | AllChargedUp0 -
301 redirecting a previously abused URL
A client previously had their most important landing page at domain.com/example.htm They carried out the sort of link building that was commonplace a few years back (exact match anchors, paid blog links etc) targeting this URL, but they also got a bunch of legitimate decent quality links here. I believe they may have had a number of issues when link quality algo updates were rolled out, so rather than try and get links removed and go through the disavow process they instead decided to abandon this URL, let it 404 and start afresh at domain.com/example.html - updating all internal navigation, XML sitemaps etc. So fast forward to today. What is the best practice for this URL these days do we think? Is it now possible to 301 domain.com/example.htm > domain.com/example.html and recover whatever value may be left here? The argument for not doing so may be that you could pass over the negative metrics associated with the old URL, but would this not be handled by the real-time penguin update and the poor links just devalued rather than actually harming? And could this just be tested - i.e. add in the 301, monitor the impact and if things don't go the way we'd want then just remove the 301 again? Would be keen to get a few opinions on this. TIA
Technical SEO | | Salience_Search_Marketing0 -
301 Redirect Review Nodes
I have a client who rents out vacation beach rentals. They currently have thousands of homes under management. Each property has its own internal reviewing platform. Reviews are not really intended to be viewed on their own, as in a stand alone page with just the review on it. The problem is that Drupal makes just about every type of node viewable on its own dedicated URL. I was just thinking about taking request to view stand alone reviews and 301’ing them to their respective property page, the context in which they are intended to be viewed. The website has about 2500 review nodes currently crawlable via Drupal that sit on their own URLs. Would there be a material impact to 301 them to their respective property page when any attempt to view them on their own is made to the site?
Technical SEO | | conversionpipeline20 -
Added 301 redirects, pages still earning duplicate content warning
We recently added a number of 301 redirects for duplicate content pages, but even with this addition they are still showing up as duplicate content. Am I missing something here? Or is this a duplicate content warning I should ignore?
Technical SEO | | cglife0 -
Creating a CSV file for uploading 301 redirect URL map
Hi if i'm bulk uploading 301 redirects whats needed to create a csv file? is it just a case of creating an excel spreadsheet & have the old urls in column A and new urls in column B and then just convert to csv and upload ? or do i need to put in other details or paremeters etc etc ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
301 Redirect with ASP (not .NET)
I'm looking to redirect non www to www and also .co.uk to .com. http://www.xxxxx.com is the intended target. http://xxxxx.com & http://www.xxxxx.co.uk & http://xxxxx.co.uk to redirect. I managed to do some of this but if I come through to a service page /services/cars.asp it redirects to the homepage. All I have so far is this code: <% If InStr(Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME"),"www") = 0 ThenResponse.write "http://www." & Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST") & Request.ServerVariables("URL") & "?" & Request.ServerVariables("QUERY_STRING")Response.EndEnd if %> What am I missing?
Technical SEO | | Hughescov0 -
Is there ever a time when 301 redirects aren't possible?
I have been told that 301 redirects are always possible. I've been told that it's a very time consuming process so developers at times will say that it's not possible. Is there ever a time when it is not impossible? Perhaps using a specific server? I know it's do-able in Apache which is the server that is in question. Would it be impossible if someone were using a templated type set of websites & if they made changes on one website it would make changes across all websites? *Edit "due to a server configuration 301 redirects aren't possible" Thanks so much for any help or answers you can provide.
Technical SEO | | DCochrane0