How important are internal pages to overall site rank?
-
This seems like it should be an easy question (and probably is), but it has stumped a few of us over the past few days. Here's the scenario:
We have a site that we are trying to optimize to rank well for a set of keywords. We have a lot of internal pages that are important to users when they visit the site (case studies, for example), but they aren't the pages that we want people to find when they search for our primary keywords.
Our question is, is it valuable to optimize those internal pages for our keywords? In other words, will having a lot of internal pages that mention our keywords affect how well our overall site ranks for those keywords? Or, is it only important to have one "hero" page for our important keywords?
Thanks!
-
I'm actually not sure if the algorithm considers all the content on the domain when assessing the relevance of a particular page. But it sounds like you WILL have a lot of topically relevant pages, no? Your site is about widgets; you have a couple of pages that are optimized for big terms like "buy widgets," "women's widgets," etc.; then you have lots of other pages that will still mention widgets in some capacity, right? It's not like you have a travel booking website and now you're trying to optimize one page for viagra?
-
If possible, I'd like to ask you the same question I just asked Kris. (We're new to this community, so I apologize if this is poor form).
So, if someone searches for a keyword and we happen to have a hero page optimized for that keyword, how will we measure against another site with a similarly-optimized hero page that ALSO has a lot of topically relevant pages? In other words, does Google take the whole site into account, or does it only return based on the strength of your one hero page?
-
So, if someone searches for a keyword and we happen to have a hero page optimized for that keyword, how will we measure against another site with a similarly-optimized hero page that ALSO has a lot of topically relevant pages? In other words, does Google take the whole site into account, or does it only return based on the strength of your one hero page?
-
If a page isn't intended to be a major landing page from organic search, there's no need to optimize it for your target keywords. When you write naturally, you'll use the keywords from time to time anyway.
That said, don't underestimate the long-tail power of pages like this. A case study about widgets in a five-star hotel could be optimized to catch people who are searching for things like "what are the best widgets for five-star hotels" or "using widgets in top hotels," that kind of thing. Write naturally, but make sure the writer ponders the various things that someone looking for that information might type into a search engine, and varies their wording accordingly.
-
Important to have a hero page (or 2) otherwise you risk keyword cannibalization. The short and dirty way to handle this of course is to make sure that any page that is basically on topic with your hero page but isn't the hero page links back to the hero page with the appropriate anchor somewhere in the editorial body. There are other more elegant ways to handle this but this way will get you into less trouble than, for example, rel-canoning all those topically relevant non-hero pages to the hero page (bad idea dont do it).
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
-
my site has 17.5m Total links according to Moz (16.6m internal follow & 840k no follow) i think i have a problem...
We are hosted by visual soft and it is a proprietory platform so we dont have full control of our site.
On-Page Optimization | | Russell-Gorilla
in comparison, 3 of our main competitors, two of which are way way bigger than us have 1.4m & 4.7m - another one still probably double or perhaps triple our size is @ 2.5m Should i worry?
Should i post my website url on here?
I would like to start working on canonical links on my site but not sure where to start, does moz pro have some sort of check or rating, i have no idea if even the basics mentioned in the tutorials have been done....
Russell0 -
To avoid the duplicate content issue I have created new urls for that specific site I am posting to and redirecting that url to the original on my site. Is this the right way to do it?
I am trying to avoid the duplicate content issue by creating new urls and redirecting them to the original url. Is this the proper way of going about it?
On-Page Optimization | | yagobi210 -
Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
Is this still considered true about INTERNAL anchor text? "Penguin seems to be targeting overly aggressive anchor text (both internally and externally), especially from low-quality sources."
Recently I've heard a few people say now it's okay to be aggressive with internal linking. So a link from mydomain.com/news to mydomain/widgets can use spammy anchor text like "best green widgets in California" that are an obvious problem for links coming in from external site. Which is accurate?
On-Page Optimization | | corlin0 -
Need help in understanding why my site does not rank well for our best content?
Hi, We are a technology site from India (Digit.in) and we create a lot of original product review content (http://www.digit.in/mobile-phones/nokia-lumia-830-review-24655.html) but don't seem to rank even in the first 4 pages on Google results. Please let me know the reason for this and how to get this fixed. Thanks Arun
On-Page Optimization | | 9dot90 -
Are three Adsense ads on a long page a negative for search ranking?
I've not a site whose home page that is #1 for a popular keyword. The page is 1200 words, plus comments following. It's a clean page with no popups, and has one large rectangle Adsense ad above the fold (lots of text around this ad, and a very high percentage of page ATF is text), and another large rectangle Adsense ad that is midway down the article (after you have to page twice to get there). So, it's a very low ad to text ratio and ATF looks very clean. I have room for one more Adsense ad closer to the bottom of the article, which would be about five page downs through the page. My question is, will placing another ad way down the page affect my ranking in any negative way? I'm so pleased with my #1 ranking I hesitate to add it. But the page converts in Adsense so well, and heat maps show a large number readers do read all the way down the page, so I'd like to pick up some more ad revenue.
On-Page Optimization | | bizzer0 -
What's better for SEO a page per review or a page with all reviews?
Was wondering what's better for SEO. We have a platform where consumers can read and write reviews. But the question is: is it better to give one page per company with all the reviews on it? Or should we have different pages for the specific company? Example: Itunes has a company page with all reviews on the page, but not the whole review. You have to click further to view the whole review (new page), at the moment this the current situation. What if we place the whole reviews on the company page, so you don't have specific pages for the reviews? Hopefully can someone help us out. Contact me if it's not clear or you want more extended information. Kind regards
On-Page Optimization | | MozzieJr0 -
How can my national ecommerce site geo target specific states for specific pages?
If I am selling sports related products for sports/teams across the country, how can I target specific states or cities through various pages on my website. I am using adwords but would like to use increase organic search results.
On-Page Optimization | | briggsb0