Landing pages "dropping" and being replaced with homepage?
-
Hi Moz People
Happy new year to all, I have an interesting one here.
I have recently been making some landing pages and they have all pretty much hit page 1 for the search terms I've focused on (UK Domain).
Up until this morning the landing page was the 8th organic result on the UK domain. However I have checked this morning and the landing page has dropped below the top 50 and instead our homepage is now showing as the last organic result on page 1.
This is intriguing to me as it has also happened to a couple of other landing pages I have made. Is this due to the relevance being driven higher by the landing pages but overall the homepage is more important to Google? Do you guys think this might start happening to the other pages that I have created? Any input would be appreciated!
( Ill give you links and search terms if you want to take a look for yourselves but I try to refrain from "self advertising" )
Happy Thursday Mozzers !
- Jamie
-
Hi Richard
Good shout, after doing some research it looks as though the page that has now been replaced with the homepage actually got 100% CTR for a search term that isn't really relevant to our service. Only 1 click though.
However the relevant searches did get a good few impressions but didn't get a single click. I guess that is going to have something to do with the sudden change.
Seems a bit harsh to take action with only 1 click ...
-
In cases where there are multiple relevant pages, Google can show different ones. Drill down in Webmaster Tools under search queries and click one of the terms. You will see how often each page is shown as well as how often the results were returned in different positions.
-
Hi Amelia
Interestingly the bounce rate for the page that has dropped is lower than the Homepage. Landing page has a 25% bounce rate while the Homepage is 26.46%.
Average time on page is slightly lower than the Homepage. The only issue here is this was a relatively new landing page and there are older ones that are actually ranking higher with much higher bounce and exit rates. In fact one of the pages that has been ranked #3 for the past month has a bounce rate of over 60%!
The only trend I am noticing is the "time on page" being higher on the landing pages that haven't been effected. I guess this is coming down to a user engagement issue as you suggest. I'll try some more provocative wording to see if that helps although now there will be little to no clicks on the effected landing pages as they have dropped so low!
Thank you for your thoughts
**** UPDATE
After doing a little more comparison it appears that the time on page theory has no weight either as the high ranking pages all have pretty low time on page also... back to the think tank lol.
-
Google 'tests' landing pages quite a lot actually. I'd have a poke around in your analytics programme and see what the bounce rate, time on site, pages per visit for each landing page. If the homepage is performing better in these areas than your landing pages then that may be why this is happening. Also look in your webmaster tools at organic CTR - if the homepage has a higher CTR then Google is assuming it's more relevant for the query.
My hunch is that this is the issue - once you've got the comparison data you can look at ways of making your landing pages better for user engagement.
Good luck,
Amelia
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
-
Page dropped after backlink
This is a bit of a odd one... I put two new pages on to my website. And built one backlink to each page (each from separate domains). The pages and backlinks have indexed quite quickly. The odd thing is that one of my pages has dropped significantly in ranking but the other has boosted significantly in ranking! The 1st page has come to page 1 of google, the other pages dropped to page 3 of google. Prior to building the links the ranks was stable. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Can you create town focused landing pages for a website without breaking Google guidelines?
I recently watched a webmaster video that said that town focused landing pages are seen as doorway pages if they only exist to capture search traffic. And then I read that just because you can sell your product/service in a certain area, doesn't mean you can have a page for it on your website. Is it possible to create town focused landing pages for a website without breaking Google guidelines?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream1 -
Can an "Event" in Structured Data For Google Be A Webinar?
I have a client who is has structured data for live business webinars. Google's documentation seems to talk more about music and tickets than this kind of thing. At the same time, we get an error in search console for "Name" and location, which they list as "webinar." Should I removed this failed structured data attempt or is there a way to fix it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
95% of organic traffic lands in my homepage, despite having a 250 page website with a "seo optimized" hierarchical structure. Any suggestion as to what might be happening?
Challenging issue All the "usual suspects" have been discarded: all pages included in google index, no google penalties, metas optimized, kw's segregated by pages/cluster of pages to avoid cannibalization... BUT, we know we are missing something website is www.e-florex.com and is an e-commerce site based on magento Any ideas you might think are worth exploring? Thanks in advance for your help Juan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | juanmarn0 -
What counts as a "deeper level" in SEO?
Hi, I am trying to make our site more crawlable and get link juice to the "bottom pages" in an ecommerce site. Currently, our site has a big mega menu - and we have: Home > CAT 1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
SUBCAT 1
SUBSUBCAT 1
PRODUCT Our URL Structure looks:
www.domain.com/cat1/subcat1/subsubcat1/ and here are the links to the products but the URL's look like: www.domain.com/product.html Obviously the ideal thing would be to cut out one of the CATEGORIES. But I may be unable to do that in the short term - so I was wondering if by taking CAT1 out of the equation - e.g., just make it a static item that allows the drop down menu to work, but no page for it - Does that cut out a level? Thanks, Ben0 -
Amount of pages indexed for classified (number of pages for the same query)
I've notice that classified usually has a lots of pages indexed and that's because for each query/kw they index the first 100 results pages, normally they have 10 results per page. As an example imagine the site www.classified.com, for the query/kw "house for rent new york" there is the page www.classified.com/houses/house-for-rent-new-york and the "index" is set for the first 100 SERP pages, so www.classified.com/houses/house-for-rent-new-york www.classified.com/houses/house-for-rent-new-york-1 www.classified.com/houses/house-for-rent-new-york-2 ...and so on. Wouldn't it better to index only the 1st result page? I mean in the first 100 pages lots of ads are very similar so why should Google be happy by indexing lots of similar pages? Could Google penalyze this behaviour? What's your suggestions? Many tahnks in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuroa-2467120 -
Links to images on a page diluting page value?
We have been doing some testing with additional images on a page. For example, the page here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/files/2550/sukhoi-su-27-flanker-package-for-fsx/ Notice the images under the heading Images/Screenshots After adding these images, we noticed a ranking drop for that page (-27 places) in the SERPS. Could the large amount of images - in particular the links on the images (links to the larger versions) be causing it to dilute the value of the actual page? Any suggestions, advice or opinions will be much appreciated.0 -
301 a strong but under-performing landing page to a new domain?
Hi guys, Our website have a very strong landing page (PA 80, more than 1,000 domains linking) but is currently not ranking at all as the targeted terms are dominated by exact match domains. We are thinking of redirecting this particular page to a new partial match domain targeting the same keywords. Is it a good move?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sssrpm0