Need advice: How to replace a high-ranking pdf with a landing page -- without dropping much in rank?
-
Hi! We have a pdf of a white paper on our site that ranks #1 for a niche term. We are now exploring the idea of building a landing page for this paper with an overview (2-3 paragraphs) and a registration form for interested parties to fill out in order to access the paper.
Do you think there'd be any hope of ensuring the new landing page would rank almost as well eventually (top 3)? I'm thinking a key consideration would be preserving the link juice from the existing links that are coming into the pdf, and that 301 redirecting the pdf URL to the new landing page URL could help with that. Am I right? Or would it be better to try to reach out to the linking sites and ask them to update their links (seems daunting).
Any advice/opinions on this situation would be appreciated. (If folks think that there would be a significant risk of permanently dropping out of the top 5 by attempting this, we would likely choose to leave the pdf ungated as is.) Thanks!!
-John
-
Thanks Chris, Bernadette and Donna for your thoughtful answers. After considering your advice (and the resources you shared), I think it's worth a try. If nothing else, it will be a good experiment (and fairly low risk -- even though the pdf ranks #1, it's not a high-volume term). I think it will be important for the landing page to provide a really meaty, useful synopsis (as Chris suggested) that still offers some value on its own. Thanks again!
-John
-
John,
Not long ago, you should have fully expected to lose up to 15% of a page's SEO equity with a 301 redirect. That changed in February of this year when Google's John Mueller announced that no page rank is lost with 301 or 302 redirects.
Moz's own Cyrus Shepard wrote a What You Need To Know Post after that announcement. I think if you read it, you'll be well equipped to weigh your options and decide on the best path forward for this particular situation.
-
John, that's a good question. Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword, I would hesitate to set up a 301 redirect--you still may see ranking changes if you replaced it with a landing page.
I suspect that the reason why it's ranking is because other sites are linking directly to the PDF file, the content. If you were to remove that PDF, they might stop linking to it.
One option would be to edit the PDF file and make that PDF the landing page (in .pdf format), that would be the same URL.
-
Hello John, interesting dilemma you have. I think you have a good idea as well. I would be interested to learn about the level of competition for this term, I imagine it can not be that intensive if your PDF is ranking #1.
My recommendation would be to build the landing page, but include some of the content from your PDF as a preview. You can then offer the free download sign up to continue reading. It's likely the PDF is ranking well because of the content.
Of course you will want to create a 301 redirect to the new landing page from the old PDF URL. Also, keep the same title tag or anchor text that people are using to link to the PDF or the title that Google is currently giving the PDF. I think you have a good chance of retaining the #1 ranking if done right.
You may also have meta information within your PDF that you will want to migrate to the landing page. We're a big fan of landing pages at AdFicient and this sounds like a promising opportunity. Best of luck.
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
-
SEO value of home page links
I was looking at the website peak7.org and there are links on the homepage that rotate at the bottom. Do such links have SEO value even though they are not static text links? Are they still counted as links by Google if they are in that rotating carousel?
Link Building | | RandyHT1 -
What happened to my ranking
Hi trying to rank for "liverpool wedding photographer" as my main keyword. my profile is mainly wedding blogs and photography blog comments, a few "featured weddings" from wedding blogs , directory links and I have also a few guest post blogs. Goy myself all excited in December by getting to 4th position and then followed that up by around 35 links in one week. So expecting my ranking to stabilise or even go up I watched my site slowly sink to a current position of 7th, over January, even as the new links kicked in. a weird thing happened in this period as the following sites where I had left one comment on a blog post ended up giving me links from nearly all the other posts they had written: http://www.richardbernabe.com/blog/2012/12/04/iceland-bound-again/ http://blog.leica-camera.com/2014/12/03/andrew-kaufman-documenting-the-disappearing-street-art-of-wynwood/ http://jnack.com/blog/2015/01/04/when-will-wearable-cameras-be-a-thing/ webmaster tools is indicating I have 374 links from the leica site, 174 links from the richardbernabe site and 77 from the njack one. They are all different blog posts! I have disavowed all three domains. Can anyone explain what has caused this multiplication of links from these particular sites? Also could my link spree have caused a penalty? Best wishes. David. http://jnack.com/blog/2015/01/04/when-will-wearable-cameras-be-a-thing/
Link Building | | WallerD0 -
Site used to rank first for main keyword - now dropped drastically
The home page for this site (http://bit.ly/4m1eXy) was ranking between #1 and #3 for the term "Minneapolis criminal defense" as of a few months ago. Now the home page has dropped to #23 for this keyword, and the only changes we've made should be enhancing its ability to rank - through on-page optimization, cleaning up site errors, and ensuring good, quality content. The thing is, the sites who rank ahead of our site have lower domain authority and page authority, and their content, quite frankly, just isn't that great. Some of them are definitely doing SEO but they aren't necessarily targeting "Minneapolis criminal defense" like we are for the search term. Before our company started doing SEO for this website, they hired a company that generated a large number of backlinks that Google would probably now see as spammy. The previous company also used to direct traffic towards the home page for the keyword "Minneapolis DWI laywer" too - and we have since stopped doing that. So I'm wondering with all of Google's algorithmic updates if this is the reason we're seeing a drop for this term, and if Google's confused. We're pretty confused, too, though, since the sites ranking ahead of us don't seem to be doing squeaky clean SEO by any means. Advice for us? We're stumped. Would anyone consider Google's disavow tool for the bad links?
Link Building | | Boogily0 -
How much is too much?
I am aware that Google's Penguin 2.0 update is looking to tackle the increasing numbers of links from poor quality websites & blogs. The advice since Penguin 1.0 has been to create a natural backlink profile, ensuring that there is a balance between keywords-rich anchor text and brand terms. I tend to link using Branded anchor text to the homepage of my website and use keyword anchor text sparingly to link to subpages/categories elsewhere on my website. My question is what exactly is too much in terms of anchor text? If for example I have 5 or 6 keyword-rich links inbound to a sub/category page, do I need to also get some brand anchor text into these sub/category pages too?
Link Building | | DHS_SH0 -
Powerpoint, doc and pdf
Do links count when they are online but in a power point, doc or pdf format?
Link Building | | pauledwards0 -
Multiple pages battling for same keyword
Hi, I have earlier had a post about this, but still I am in doubt. I posted: http://www.seomoz.org/q/page-not-being-indexed The keyword "betsafe" in that question has now "bounced" back and is now the page shown in SERPS for the search keyword. This is great, however I don't know why. By checking the URL in OSE i have discovered that the page has in-links from SEOmoz.org. Which comes from the above questions thread. Can it really be, that these 2 links from SEOmoz forum has done the difference? We appareantly have zero links from other sites to the URL, despite actually having them on another site. Now we are having trouble with keyword: "bet365" which should show page http://www.betxpert.com/bookmakere/bet365 but does not (on google.dk). I have optimized the page as far as I can stretch it without doing in in an unnatural way. Only thing left to do is bring down number of links. What is your advice? Should I simply try to link build for the URL with the keyword - and then it will beat our other pages which seem to steal the SERPS? -Rasmus
Link Building | | rasmusbang0 -
Why is my Page Rank 0.
Hi, I am trying to understand why my Page Rank is 0. Many forums say that it is because my site has been blocked by google. Any help with this would be much appreciated. http://davincidrivers.com
Link Building | | MariaPerrone0 -
Links from low PA pages on high DA sites... What effect do they have?
My company's website has inbound links from very high DA websites (LinkedIn 96, Yelp 91, etc.) but from pages with very low PA (1). These low PA pages are the company listings pages. In the case of Linked In, there are several products/services listed with ideal anchor text to the relevant pages on our site. How do these links effect our overall ranking and trust, and why aren't they listed when I use OSE to analyze my pages? Thanks!
Link Building | | sverdino0