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
-
What to do about endless size pages
I'm working on a site that sells products that come in many different sizes. One product may come in 30 sizes.The products themselves are identical, except for the size. There are collections pages that are all of several kinds of product in a particular size and then there are individual product pages of one product the specific size. Collections pages for widgets size 30 is the same content as widgets size 29. A single product page for gold-widget-size-30 is the same content as the single product page gold-widget-size-29. To make matters worse, they all have the same tags and very little written content. The site is in Shopify. Last month there were almost 400 pages that produced visits on organic, mostly in the 1 to 4 per month range, but all together about 1000 visits. There are several hundred more that produced no traffic in organic, but are duplicate (except for size) and part of this giant ball of tangled string. What do you think I should do? Thanks... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Big discrepancies between pages in Google's index and pages in sitemap
Hi, I'm noticing a huge difference in the number of pages in Googles index (using 'site:' search) versus the number of pages indexed by Google in Webmaster tools. (ie 20,600 in 'site:' search vs 5,100 submitted via the dynamic sitemap.) Anyone know possible causes for this and how i can fix? It's an ecommerce site but i can't see any issues with duplicate content - they employ a very good canonical tag strategy. Could it be that Google has decided to ignore the canonical tag? Any help appreciated, Karen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?
If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage? Nothing? Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
Low Page Authority in existing article in blog Any Ideas to improve it?
Im managing a blog that has a lot of articles with Page Authority 1.I have already checked with On-page Grader that these articles are Grade A, so they have the SEO structure perfect and would like to know any ideas to get this Page Authority rise in existing articles that are already written, like changes that can effectively be made this page authority get higher. Thanks in advance and regards, Jorge Pascual
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | goperformancelabs0 -
Pages ending in .ad extension?
My company recently updated it's layout for thumbnails and property pages. Previously they displayed as /Property/123456-123%20MAIN%20Street-SPRINGFIELD-PA-98765 I know that was pretty bad URL structure so I was glad it was being changed, but now property pages are simply displaying as /6294888.ad What the heck is the .ad extension?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BD690 -
Optimize the category page or a content page?
Hi, We wish to start ranking on a specific keyword ("log house prices" in italian). We have two options on what pages we should optimize for this keyword: A long content page (1000+ words with images) Log houses category page, optimized for the keyword (we have 50+ houses on this page, together with a short price summary). I would think that we have better chances with ranking with option nr.2 , but then we can't use that page for ranking with a more short-tail keyword (like "log houses"). What would you suggest? Is there maybe a third option for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohanMattisson0 -
Multiple 301 Redirects for the Same Page
Hi Mozzers, What happens if I have a trail of 301 redirects for the same page? For example,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
SiteA.com/10 --> SiteA.com/11 --> SiteA.com/13 --> SiteA.com/14 I know I lose a little bit of link juice by 301 redirecting.
The question is, would the link juice look like this for the example above? 100% --> 90% --> 81% -->72.9%
Or just 100% -----------------------------------------> 90% Does this link juice refer to juice from inbound links or links between internal pages on my site? Thanks!0 -
Can pages compete with each other? Inbound links & domain authority, How to determine problem areas?
Heyy, I'm having some pretty big SEO issues. 😞 We have had some drops in our ranking. We're 5th page or worse depending on location for a few of our keywords that we used to rank well for. There are all sorts of random non relevant sites outranking us for the term "stickley" and "stickley furniture" One thing I noticed is that we are ranking for a different page for each keyphrase. Our home page is ranking for "Stickley" and our stickley page is ranking for "Stickley Furniture" Is this normal? I guess Google is just picking what it see's as what's more relevant. Is it possible that these two pages are "competing?" Do similar phrases linking to different pages cause pages to "fight" or unevenly disperse link juice? I'm having trouble knowing which page I should send inbound links to since Google seems to be linking similar keywords to different pages. How much should I stress about which pages I receive links on? Is it true that any inbound link to a site site will help increase its overall domain authority and overall SEO? What should I be focusing on? I've added 301 redirects for non WWW as well as tried to make the pages well optimized for SEO. Should I just add more related content to the pages? I know backlinks are important but I'm having a really hard time figuring out how to get links that aren't just spammy forum post footers or junk directory submissions. The thing that bothers me is we were ranking well and then suddenly are way back. We have never done any black hat SEO of any sort. I feel a bit stuck and confused at the moment 😞 Thanks in advance for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SheffieldMarketing
-Amy0