Landing page, or redirect? Looking for feedback.
-
If we have a section of our site that we have branded separately from the rest of the site, does it make sense to provide a landing page on our current, high authority site that has content and links off to the separate site, or would just a domain.com/keyword redirect to the page be a better route? Does it matter? I have an idea, but I'd like to get feedback on this.
We are a newspaper, http://billingsgazette.com and we have an auto branded site called http://montanawheelsforyou.com. The URL and branding is fubar. We're wondering if we can increase the ranking if we swapped out the http://billingsgazette.com/autos from a redirect to http://montanawheelsforyou.com to a landing page with content and a link to http://montanawheelsforyou.com.
-
Rachel,
-
All the links going to /autos are telling Google that the page is valuable.
-
Changing /autos to a landing page is then telling search engines that the landing page is valuable but it will require some work to gain some page authority.
-
A link from this page will not bring as much link juice.
However, A link is usually more authoritative than a redirect.
Changing a redirect to a page might lose some juice.
I think the best solution is to create http://billingsgazette.com NEW PAGE NAME and use it as your new landing page, fill it with great content and link it in the menu with the old anchor text "Autos"
From this page, you can add a link to http://billingsgazette.com/autos using some cool anchor text.
I then recommend that you add a link DIRECTLY too http://www.montanawheelsforyou.com/ at the bottom of the page in Sites & partners with the anchor text Montana wheels.
-
-
Just to make sure I understand you, you're saying that if we created a landing page on Billingsgazette.com, which has high authority and is well-established, and put a link out to our newer MontanaWheelsForYou.com website that we are in return sending sweet sweet link juice from our established site to our new site. So, doing this could actually help as opposed to hinder.
Thanks for the feedback - it's 100% the kind I was looking for!
-
Rachael,
Just for clarity (I actually had to draw this out to understand it): Current is BillingsGazette.com/autos 301's to MontanaWheelsForYou.com; correct?
You instead want to create a landing page for BillingsGazette.com/autos that has a link to MontanaWheelsForYou.com in order to increase ranking of MontanaWheelsForYou.com; correct?
If billingsGazette.com/autos Page redirects to MontanaWheelsForYou.com you are passing the link juice to the MontanaWheelsForYou.com page. If you create a new landing page say, billingsgazette.com/autos/landing-page and place a link to MontanaWheelsForYou.com, the new landing page will start with only the one link will not have the value that the older established page had in the beginning. Assuming that billingsgazette.com/autos also links to other pages, etc. the value of the link is: billings .../autos page divided by all the links leaving the page and each receives its share.
To make it easy, the redirect is sending all the value to the MontanaWheelsForYou.com page. So if the page billingsgazette.com/autos has a value of say 50 and you have 10 links, your new page would receive roughly a 5 value. And, if it has more than the link to the one page, the five would be divided again. So, from the landing page with value of 5 if more than the link to MontanaWheelsForYou.com then the value is less than five.
Hope that helps,
Robert
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
-
Does A Local Therapist Need A Blog, or Should They Focus on Main Service Pages?
Hi everyone! I am just starting to practice SEO by assisting a friend with her local relationship therapy practice, and I'm not sure whether or not she needs a blog. Here's the content they currently have: A page for specific categories within relationship therapy (unmarried couples, marriage, divorce, pre-marital, etc) On each page, she describes what that type of therapy is, what clients can expect, and how she will help them during the process. My question is this: Does it make sense to start a blog, or, is it better to build out the main, static service pages with more content? I'm worried that if she does start a blog, that it could potentially take away from the authority of the main service pages. For example, let's say she writes a highly specific post titled "how to talk to your husband about marriage". Is it better to just incorporate aspects of this post on the main marriage page, or keep it as a blog post? I really appreciate any suggestions and I'm happy to answer any questions.
Local Website Optimization | | onitamara0 -
Service Location links in footer and on the service page - spamming or good practice?
We are are a managed IT services business so we try and target people searching for IT support in a number of key areas. We have created individual location pages (11) to localise our service in these specific areas. We put these location links in the footer which went to the specified IT support pages respectively. Now we have created a general 'managed IT services' page and are thinking of linking to these specific pages on there as well as it makes sense to do it. Would having these 11 links in the footer as well as on the 'managed IT services' page be spamming? or would it be good practice? If this is spamming, which linking location should hold preference. Would appreciate the feedback
Local Website Optimization | | AndyL93
Thanks
Andy0 -
Site Audit: Indexed Pages Issue
Over the last couple of months I've been working through some issues with a client. One of my starting points was doing a site Audit. I'm following a post written by Geoff Kenyon https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 . One of the main issues of the site audit seems to be that when I run a "site:domain.com" query in Google my homepage isn't the first page listed in fact it isn't listed in this search when I go through all of the listings. I understand that it isn't required to have your homepage listed first when running this type of query, but I would prefer it. Here are some things I've done I ran another query "info:homepage.com" and the home page is indexed by Google. When I run a branded search for the company name the home page does come up first. The current page that is showing up first in the "site:domain.com" listing is my blog index page. Several months back I redirected the index.php page to the root of the domain. Not sure if this is helping or hurting. In the sitemap I removed the index.php and left only the root domain as the page to index. Also all interior links are sent to the root, index.php has been eliminated from all internal links everything links to root The main site navigation does not refer to the "Home" page, but instead my logo is the link to the Home page. Should I noindex my blog/index.php page? This page is only a compilation of posts and does not have any original content instead it actually throws up duplicate content warnings. Any help would be much appreciated. I apologize if this is a silly question, but I'm getting frustrated/ annoyed at the whole situation.
Local Website Optimization | | SEO_Matt0 -
Suburb Pages
Hey Mozers, This is an old and often criticized method of SERP however we have a client who has requested we create suburb specific pages for their site. PLASTIC PLANTS "SUBURB" NEED PLASTIC PLANTS IN "SUBURB" They have shown us a competitor who is ranking for hundreds maybe thousands of suburbs in Australia using this method. Any thoughts or experience in this area would be appreciated.
Local Website Optimization | | wearehappymedia0 -
Local Service pages guide?
There are a lots of Local landing pages guide on the internet. Is there any guide for Local service pages? How to create them, what to include?
Local Website Optimization | | Michael.Leonard0 -
Why has my site dropped to page 2?
I haven't been paying attention to my sites SERP for the past year, and only realized I've dropped to page 2 on a keyword search. Specifically, on Google.ca, searching the keywords "wedding invitations" My site, www.stephita.com, used to consistently rank in the top 3 links. While my competitors have leapfrogged me. 😞 I realized that my site wasn't "mobile-friendly", and had a few other issues like keyword stuffing, long meta descriptions and titles. I've fixed these issues "now", but wanted to know does this mean my site was severely penalized by the Panda/Penguin updates for the last few years? Does having a PR3 site mean anything? My competitors who our rank me on SERP, are all PR1 sites. Greatly appreciate any feedback you can give me! 🙂
Local Website Optimization | | TysonWong0 -
Pages ranking outside of sales area
Hi there Moz Community, I work with a client (a car dealership), that mostly serves an area within 50-100 miles at most from their location. A previous SEO company had built a bunch of comparison pages on their website (i.e. 2016 Acura ILX vs. Mercedes-Benz C300). These pages perform well in their backyard in terms of engagement metrics like bounce rate, session duration, etc. However, they pull in traffic from all over the country and other countries as well. Because they really don't have much of an opportunity to sell someone a car across the country that a customer could easily buy at their local dealership, anyone from outside their primary marketing area typically bounces. So, it drags down their overall site metrics plus all of the metrics for these pages. I imagine searchers from outside their primary sales area are seeing their location and saying "whoah that's far and not what I'm looking for." I tried localizing the pages by putting their city name in the title tags, meta descriptions, and content, but that doesn't seem to really be getting rid of this traffic from areas too far away to sell a car to. My worry is that the high bounce rates, low time on site, and general irrelevancy of these pages to someone far away are going to affect them negatively. So, short of trying to localize the content on the page or just deleting these pages all together, I'm not quite sure where to go from here. Do you think that having these high bouncing pages will hurt them? Any suggestions would be welcomed. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | Make_Model1 -
Closed Location Pages - 301 to open locations?
I work with several thousand local businesses and have a listing page for each on my site. Recently a large chunk of these locations closed, and a number of these pages rank well for localized keywords. I'm trying to figure out the best course of action.
Local Website Optimization | | Andrew_Mac
What I've done so far is make a note on each of the closed location pages that says something to the effect of "This location is currently closed. Here are some nearby options" and provide links to the location pages of 3 open places nearby. The closed location pages are continuing to rank well, but conversion rates from visitors landing on these pages has dropped. What I'm considering doing is 301ing these pages to the nearest open location page. I'm hoping this will preserve the ranking of the page for keywords for which the nearby location is still relevant, while not hurting user experience by serving up a closed location. I'm also thinking of, as a second step, creating new pages (with slightly altered URLs) for the closed listings. They won't rank as well obviously, but if someone searches for the address or even the street of the closed location, my hope is that I could still capture some of that traffic and hope to convert it through someone clicking through to an open location from there. I spoke with someone about this second step and he thought it sounded spammy. My thinking is, combined with the 301, I'm telling Google that the page it is currently ranking well no longer has the importance it once did and that the page I'm 301ing to does, but that the content on the page I'm creating for the closed location still has enough value to justify the newly created page. I'd really appreciate thoughts from the community on this. Thanks!0