Google Penguin - Target Landing Page
-
Hello,
One of our sites have been hit by the first penguin update back in April and ever since then we have been removing links and submitting reconsideration requests...
It only seems to have affected our home page as some of our internal landing pages are still ranking OK in the SERPS #1 / #2.
I'm just wondering if we created a landing page for this keyword and drove high quality / relevant links to this landing page could we get it to rank higher than our homepage even though our Homepage is on the 5th page.Hope the above make sense.
Has anybody had any joy with this?
-
I have nothing to add here as Ryan has pretty much nailed it but "algorithmically disadvantaged" made me chuckle!
-
You can achieve what you are asking, but I would not advise doing such.
SEO is about one factor, competition. Period.
If you decided to rank for a unique term such as "fluffy SEO eating bunnies" and no one else is attempting to rank for that term, you can easily rank #1 for it. On the other hand, if 10 other sites try to rank for the same term, then it is a pure competition and one site will win the battle.
It is hard enough to earn rankings. Trying to rank with a penalized site, or for the more sensitive readers "algorithmically disadvantaged", is not wise. You need to resolve the root issue.
To put it in financial terms, add up the sales you have lost over the past months due to lower rankings. Now examine the cost of removing the penalty. Even most small businesses will find it cheaper to have the penalty or Penguin issue dealt with properly then trying to rank with a penalized site.
Also consider Penguin is undergoing a major update. Matt Cutts shared the effects of the next Penguin update will be "jarring and jolting". There are only two ways I can interpret that statement. Either many sites which have not been impacted by Penguin in the past will be affected, sites which have been impacted will be hit a lot harder, or both. My bet is on both.
Having a penalty or Penguin issue on your site is like having your house on fire. You are standing there with a hose trying to put out the fire. It's time to call 911 and have the fire put out, then work on repairing the damage.
I applaud do-it-yourself SEO for small, highly involved business owners under normal circumstances. Manual penalties and algorithmic issues such as Penguin require expertise to deal with, otherwise you will submit 10 Reconsideration Requests and have all 10 declined. Clearly, you are not properly addressing the root issue.
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
-
Google Search Console Showing 404 errors for product pages not in sitemap?
We have some products with url changes over the past several months. Google is showing these as having 404 errors even though they are not in sitemap (sitemap shows the correct NEW url). Is this expected? Will these errors eventually go away/stop being monitored by Google?
Technical SEO | | woshea0 -
Google Displaying wrong URL but correct page title and description in SERPS
Hi. Our second highest performing page on Google is messed up in the SERPS. This is our login page. It always ranks high. It still does, but the URL is incorrect. Google is referencing an old redirect that was for a one off campaign from January 2014. This page has long been redirected. But now the vanity url for this page is what is displayed in Google. The link goes to our login page but once you log in it redirects you to a page saying the offer has expired instead of your account details. This is a huge issue for us. Can anyone shed some light? I'm having a rel canonical added since this page is used for a lot of vanity deeplinks.
Technical SEO | | PollyKane0 -
How do I influence what page on my site google shows for specific search phrases?
Hi People, My client has a site www.activeadventures.com. They provide adventure tours of New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas. These destinations are split into 3 folders in the site (eg: activeadventures.com/new-zealand, activeadventures.com/south-america etc....). The actual root folder of the site is generic information for all of the destinations whilst the destination specific folders are specific in their information for the destination in question. The Problem: If you search for say "Active New Zealand" or "Adventure Tours South America" our result that comes up is the activeadventures.com homepage rather than the destination folder homepage (eg: We would want activeadventures.com/new-zealand to be the landing page for people searching for "active new zealand"). Are there any ways in influence google as to what page on our site it chooses to serve up? Many thanks in advance. Conrad
Technical SEO | | activenz0 -
Do Com Junct links affect your site with Google and Penguin
We received the dreaded letter from google in reference to "unnatural or artificial links" Our site has affiliate programs through Commission Junction and Link Share and between the two programs we have over 8000 affiliates or advertisers. Our site has been very successful, but our organic search traffic is down as our rankings in the search engines have dropped. My question is do the affiliate links have an effect on our site with Panda or Penguin?
Technical SEO | | Statrak0 -
Keyword Targeting with Dynamic Pages
We have a large e-commerce website made with .net. so all of our category and item pages are made dynamic. Most things like title, some of the words and a few other things are done with scripts. I want to be able to target certain words and have more customized words on certain pages. Has anyone dealt with this? I know .net is pretty common so I can't be a unique case.
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Can you have the same brand name for two distinct Google Places Pages
Hello Mozers I'd like to know if two existing GPP can have the same name 'spabycar'. At present 'mobile nail technician' based in W1 and 'spabycar 'WD' are ranking (ironically the one that has the old brand name is very high!). Both need to be 'spabycar' If this is feasible, is there a down side, and is there a good tutorial source for an aspirant to follow? Thanks Catherine
Technical SEO | | catherine-2793880 -
Product landing page URL's for e-commerce sites - best practices?
Hi all I have built many e-commerce websites over the years and with each one, I learn something new and apply to the next site and so on. Lets call it continuous review and improvement! I have always structured my URL's to the product landing pages as such: mydomain.com/top-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category/product-name Now this has always worked fine for me but I see more an more of the following happening: mydomain.com/top-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category => mydomain.com/product-name Now I have read many believe that the longer the URL, the less SEO impact it may have and other comments saying it is better to have the just the product URL on the final page and leave out the categories for one reason or another. I could probably spend days looking around the internet for peoples opinions so I thought I would ask on SEOmoz and see what other people tend to use and maybe establish the reasons for your choices? One of the main reasons I include the categories within my final URL to the product is simply to detect if a product name exists in multiple categories on the site - I need to show the correct product to the user. I have built sites which actually have the same product name (created by the author) in multiple areas of the site but they are actually different products, not duplicate content. I therefore cannot see a way around not having the categories in the URL to help detect which product we want to show to the user. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | yousayjump0 -
Exclude mobile pages from non mobile Google serps
Hi Everybody I see that a lot of our pages on our mobile shop has started to turn up when i do site:domainname.com on google. As they could potentially compete with the similar non mobile version of the same page, is there some way to exlude the mobile domain in non mobile google result without blocking the mobile version altogether. We use an m.domain.com version for our mobile site.
Technical SEO | | AndersDK0