Deeper Levels = Lower Page Authority?
-
After migrating 8 sites into one last year, which went quite successfully, we're now looking into SEO much deeper and how we can improve overall.
Something I have noticed is the deeper the pages, the longer the url, the lower the page authority. It almost halves for each level the page gets deeper.
Is this true? And if so how can we combat this?
I know content is key, but is there anything else we can do?
Many thanks
-
Hi Harry,
I changed the status to "Discussion", because - as a moderator - I consider that the answers summed up substantially offer you a solution, but - as it is quite common in SEO - there is space for further discussion.
Moreover, the "discussion" status may attract more people into offering valuable opinions.
-
Is there a way I can mark this question back to unanswered as I still feel we haven't reached a definite conclusion?
Thanks!
-
Thank you all for your answers.
I'll try and respond to some of your questions:
-
Yes Domain Authority - This was high on the old sites and now has dropped since moving what was a home page to now a level 1 sub home page (e.g. website.com/this-was-a-home-page). The old DA was lower than the PA but not by much. Overall though it seems we have lost a lot of DA. The domain name its self has changed, but it's almost like not much DA has been brought across.
-
Backlinks - Since we had 8 different businesses with 8 different websites, they linked to each other which created most of our backlinks. We have asked for other backlinks we had that came from the brand website themselves to be changed, but unfortunately a lot of the brands we represent will not link to us directly. We have also updated any sites like DMOZ with our new address.
-
Home page links - Every page links back to it's corresponding brand home page, as well as the overall home page.
-
We have many internal links and strong navigation allowing you to go to almost anywhere with just 1 or 2 clicks. Our urls don't go deeper than 3 levels.
Just an overview of our site structure which may help:
Overall company home page
Brand A home | Brand B home | Brand C home etc... For 8 brands
Brand A content | Brand B content | Brand C content etc...
Brand A subcontent | Brand B subcontent | Brand C subcontent etc...To put it in context of real estate:
Our company overview home page
Apartments | Houses | Mansions | Holiday Homes
Info about our apartments | info about our houses | info about our mansions | info about our holiday homes
Info about individual apartments | info about individual houses | info about individual mansions | info about individual holiday homesAll with the ability to jump between these categories easily.
Thank you for all your help so far, I hope the above helps you to help us further!
Many thanks
-
-
Apart the two good answers here above, your situation explains why one of the most important (and sadly forgotten) facets of on-site SEO is Internal Linking.
Be always sure to create justified opportunities for internally linking your deepest levels for your strongest upper ones.
For instance, we usually see in the home page that real estates are presented in different ways:
- New appartments;
- Most viewed;
- Most reviewed (if you offer a way to "thumb up"/review/star them
- etc etc
What we almost never see is using this way of showing "products" on a category and sub-category level. That method, though, would help you giving a strong internal link, which will make stronger the apartments pages that matters the most for your business, because those internal links let the bots to "jump" directly to the apartment's page without the need to pass through too many levels.
That is also one the functions of what I define as topical hub, about what I talked in the WBF linked by Dirk in his comment.
-
Thanks for citing my WBF Dirk!
About your doubt, Harry, there are few things that are not that clear:
- Do the migrated domains had a strong home page PA, but a not so strong DA? Or the contrary (stronger DA than home page PA);
- When the migration had been done, how the backlinks of the migrated domains were treated? Did you ask to update at least the most relevant ones so to point to the new URLs, or you just considered that 301 would have solve this facet of the migration?
I ask this because if the migration was correct in every facet, and the home pages were strong, than the PA of the new "home pages" on level 1 should be almost the same.
On the other hand, DO NOT confuse PA with PageRank. They are two very different metrics, as PageRank calculates just the value offered by all the links (internal and external) pointing to a URL, while PA consider also other things (on-page, for instance).
A loss in PR is quite normal, because the new internal linking (links toward deeper levels, but also the link toward the new home page), are redistributing PR (and possibly PA in how PA works) so that a 1:1 coincidence between old situation and new is almost impossible.
-
What Dirk says is right, but there are ways to improve authority. Make sure you have a link on all of the new subsite pages to its corresponding "home" page. You'll also want to update any backlinks that pointed to the old home pages to point to the new subpage.
-
Hi Dirk,
Thank you for your reply.
Our problem is that all our our second levels used to be individual websites with DA and PA of around 25-30. Now however after the migration, what used to be the home pages of individual sites are now 1 level down from the domain and have lost a huge amount of authority.
Is there something we've done wrong or is this simply what happens when merging lots of sites into one? What was the home page with high DA and PA is now much lower due to being a subfolder.
Thanks!
-
It would be quite logical. Compare it with real estate. Your primary location is your homepage -which normally will list your most important & interesting content. As you normally cannot put everything on your home, you shift less important content to level 2, and then 3 ..etc. The deeper the content - the less important you find it. So it's quite normal that Google follows this logic as well.
The second part is the number of internal links - because your most important content will receive a lot of internal links. Normally - the more links a piece of content receives, the closer it will be to the homepage (chances are bigger it receives links from the home, level 2 or level 3 content).
Index pages can help to move your content closer to the home - but this will only get you so far (this doesn't change a lot to the number of links these articles receive).
You could try to regroup your content in a cluster per theme - with it's own homepage & a lot on links inside the cluster to create more internal (theme based links) & move content closer to the home. There is an interesting post on this topic from Gianluca Fiorelli: http://moz.com/blog/topical-hubs-whiteboard-friday
Hope this helps,
Dirk
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
-
Is it ok to repeat a (focus) keyword used on a previous page, on a new page?
I am cataloguing the pages on our website in terms of which focus keyword has been used with the page. I've noticed that some pages repeated the same keyword / term. I've heard that it's not really good practice, as it's like telling google conflicting information, as the pages with the same keywords will be competing against each other. Is this correct information? If so, is the alternative to use various long-winded keywords instead? If not, meaning it's ok to repeat the keyword on different pages, is there a maximum recommended number of times that we want to repeat the word? Still new-ish to SEO, so any help is much appreciated! V.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vitzz1 -
Optimized pages ranking lower than homepage with keywords
Ok, I know this question has been out there before, but i don't know how fo search for it specifically enough. I have several keywords that rank higher on my home page. As you know MOZ assigns keywords to whichever page on your site popping up in search first. So even though i have A-grade optimized pages for a particular keyword, that page may not pop up BEFORE the homepage for instance, on searches. In many cases, the homepage is grade "F" for a particular keyword, yet its pulling up first for most of my keywords. I know that my homepage has more rank because it gets the most visits and i'm sure we can't really optimize the homepage for EVERY keyword. What is the best thing to do in this situation? Do i just need to wait for my optimized page to catch up in rank, or is there a trick to optimizing homepage to ALL key words at grade "A" level? Do i need to keep back-linking to my optimized page directly to get the juice up? I created all these great optimized pages for specific keywords, but my homepage which shows "F" grade is the one pulling up 4th or 5th on searches Help??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DrMcCoy0 -
Should i redirect this page?
Hi I have the following 2 pages: http://www.over50choices.co.uk/Funeral-Planning.aspx http://www.over50choices.co.uk/Funeral-Planning/Funeral-Plans.aspx My dilema is that google sees the words "funeral planning" & "funeral plans" as the same thing, which might explain why the "funeral plan" page is not ranked v well. My issue is that the "funeral planning" page is at category level and introduces the wider subject of funeral planning, which isnt just funeral plans, so if i 301 my "funeral plan" page i will have no where to talk about funeral plans. My question is, Is the "funeral plan" page not ranked v well because of this or do i just need better optimisation of the funeral plan page so google is clear which is the key focus for each page? Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
First Link on Page Still Only Link on Page?
Bruce Clay and others did some research and found that the first link on the page is the most important and what is accredited as the link. Any other links on the page mean nothing. Is this still true? And in that case, on an ecommerce site with category links in the top navigation (which is high on the code), is it not useful to link to categories in the content of the page? Because the category is already linked to on that page. Thank you, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Page and Domain Authority
How much Page and Domain Authority we need to look for to secure a backlink.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ross254sidney0 -
Site less than 20 pages shows 1,400+ pages when crawled
Hello! I’m new to SEO, and have been soaking up as much as I can. I really love it, and feel like it could be a great fit for me – I love the challenge of figuring out the SEO puzzle, plus I have a copywriting/PR background, so I feel like that would be perfect for helping businesses get a great jump on their online competition. In fact, I was so excited about my newfound love of SEO that I offered to help a friend who owns a small business on his site. Once I started, though, I found myself hopelessly confused. The problem comes when I crawl the site. It was designed in Wordpress, and is really not very big (part of my goal in working with him was to help him get some great content added!) Even though there are only 11 pages – and 6 posts – for the entire site, when I use Screaming Frog to crawl it, it sees HUNDREDS of pages. It stops at 500, because that is the limit for their free version. In the campaign I started here at SEOmoz, and it says over 1,400 pages have been crawled…with something like 900 errors. Not good, right? So I've been trying to figure out the problem...when I look closer in Screaming Frog, I can see that some things are being repeated over and over. If I sort by the Title, the URLs look like they’re stuck in a loop somehow - one line will have /blog/category/postname…the next line will have /blog/category/category/postname…and the next line will have /blog/category/category/category/postname…and so on, with another /category/ added each time. So, with that, I have two questions Does anyone know what the problem is, and how to fix it? Do professional SEO people troubleshoot this kind of stuff all of the time? Is this the best place to get answers to questions like that? And if not, where is? Thanks so much in advance for your help! I’ve enjoyed reading all of the posts that are available here so far, it seems like a really excellent and helpful community...I'm looking forward to the day when I can actually answer the questions!! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K.Walters0 -
Should I block temporary pages
I need some SEO advice on an odd scenario: We are launching a new product line (party supplies) on it's own domain (PartySuperCenter.com). Due to some internal/technical reasons we will not be able to launch the site until the summer. We already have the product in our warehouse so the owners want to created a section on our current site (CostumeSuperCenter.com) for the new products. Once the new site is up the product will be removed from our current site and moved to the new site. I am concerned about the effect this will have on our SEO - having thousands of product pages appear and then disappear after a few months. I was thinking about blocking the pages using the "noindex" tag. Is this how you would handle it? Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | costume0 -
Why does my home page show up in search results instead of my target page for a specific keyword?
I am using Wordpress and am targeting a specific keyword..and am using Yoast SEO if that question comes up.. and I am at 100% as far as what they recommend for on page optimization. The target html page is a "POST" and not a "Page" using Wordpress definitions. Also, I am using this Pinterest style theme here http://pinclone.net/demo/ - which makes the post a sort of "pop-up" - but I started with a different theme and the results below were always the case..so I don't know if that is a factor or not. (I promise .. this is not a clever spammy attempt to promote their theme - in fact parts of it don't even work for me yet so I would not recommend it just yet...) I DO show up on the first page for my keyword.. however.. instead of Google showing the page www.mywebsite.com/this-is-my-targeted-keyword-page.htm Google shows www.mywebsite.com in the results instead. The problem being - if the traffic goes only to my home page.. they will be less likely to stay if they dont find what they want immediately and have to search for it.. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chunkyvittles0