What to do with pre-panda gateway pages?
-
We used an SEO firm back in the day to create gateway landing pages for our site heavily optimized for certain keywords and phrases. They ranked well for years and then the panda/penguin updates hit and the pages no longer rank at all. The content on the pages is actually useful and decent (http://payloadz.com/info-sell-ebooks.asp). The html is over-optimized on keyword though.
What should be our strategy here? The keywords and phrases are still important for us. Should we move the content to another URL with less HTML optimization, remove the existing optimization on the pages where they are? The backlinks are of poor quality as well.
We have gone through a disavow process and still no affect on these pages after a month.
-
You're welcome Shannon. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to help out, even if the news isn't so good to hear.
-
Thanks Everette, your candid response is much appreciated.
-
If the page you linked to is indicative of the other pages as well, I'd just delete them, let the page 404 so it gets removed from the index, disavow the links, and start over with better content. You say the content is useful, but I read the entire thing and it sounds very much like it was written for the sole purpose of stuffing a bunch of keywords about selling eBooks. It was not very useful at all.
My advice would be to get rid of pages like that completely and if you're going to write about selling eBooks do so without thinking so much about keywords or SEO, and just focus on providing the absolute BEST guide to selling eBooks that you can. This will require a writer who is actually an expert at selling eBooks, which means it will cost more money to produce the content. Think quality over quantity. Scale down your landing page strategy drastically and just be as informative as you can.
Good luck. It is a bitter pill to swallow, but you're not the only one having to deal with it.
-
Thanks for the reply Erwan. Unfortunately, a new domain just is not in the cards for us at this time.
-
A French e-commerce had the same issue:
-
they picked a new domain.
-
they used a java-script redirection from the old homepage (no 301), which is not supposed to pass penalty (to be verified) - it helps to redirect people who bookmarked the website/the direct visitors.
-
they tried to understand the reason of the penalty and changed their way to build links (no more links on farm websites, diversified anchor etc, more nofollow, no over optimized titles etc).
-
they updated the top old links.
-
they used SEA and bought ads the first 6 months to keep the same traffic.
One year later, they got an even better traffic than before the penalty.
-
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
-
Inserting Keywords in Web Pages
Hello! Question: When I add chosen keywords to my site (in urls, title tags, meta description, page content, headers, etc), do I need to put the words on my webpage exactly as they appear in my keyword research? So if I searched "therapist bay area" and I want to include these keywords, for example, must I use those words in that order in a sentence or header on my homepage? Or is it enough to include each word somewhere on the page?
On-Page Optimization | | LPantell0 -
Landing Page Idea
I have an Insurance Agency and I'm working on new landing pages to hit our surrounding cities. my 1st question is: On my Homeowners Insurance Page, can I add a section for Area's We Insure. To look like this Area's We Insure Allen Plano Frisco McKinney Highland Park Then make each one linkable to it's City Landing Page? Is there any reason this would hurt my seo? 2nd Question: Can I have the City Pages hidden from my navigation- as I already have a huge drop down menu already. Would any of the above hurt my seo**? ** Huge Thanks in Advance!
On-Page Optimization | | MissThumann0 -
Should we rename and update a page or create a new page entirely?
Hi Moz Peoples! We have a small site with a simple site navigation, with only a few links on the nav bar. We have been doing some work to create a new page, which will eventually replace one of the links on the nav bar. The question we are having is, is it better to rename the existing page and replace its content and then wait for the great indexer to do its thing, or perm delete the page and replace it with the new page and content? Or is this a case where it really makes no difference as long as the redirects are set up correctly?
On-Page Optimization | | Parker8180 -
Product Page Links
I have a product category page at https://www.hurtlegear.com.au/s1000rr/ which currently has 38 products on it. Problem is, all the product titles start with the name of the text: "bmw s1000rr" (because that's what they are) - so that means there are 38 anchored internal links on that page, all starting with the same keyword. You can see how that might look to the Google crawler. Recently that page dropped from around 15 to outside the top 100, and Moz tells me that the page is keyword stuffed with "bmw s1000rr" (no suprise) so I'm guessing that may be the reason the page has disappeared out of the SERPs. I don't really want to change all the product titles (then they wouldn't make sense) so I'm just wondering if there is any way around this? Is there some way of telling Google that this is a product category page and therefore to ignore the anchor text in all of those product links? Can/should the links have some kind of markup on them? Or is the page beyond help? Basically I'm looking at a way of keeping the product titles as they are, but avoiding a page penalty from Google somehow. I'm a bit of a newbie, any suggestions would be most appreciated. Cheers, Graeme
On-Page Optimization | | graeme720 -
Locating Duplicate Pages
Hi, Our website consists of approximately 15,000 pages however according to our Google Webmaster Tools account Google has around 26,000 pages for us in their index. I have run through half a dozen sitemap generators and they all only discover the 15,000 pages that we know about. I have also thoroughly gone through the site to attempt to find any sections where we might be inadvertently generating duplicate pages without success. It has been over six months since we did any structural changes (at which point we did 301's to the new locations) and so I'd like to think that the majority of these old pages have been removed from the Google Index. Additionally, the number of pages in the index doesn't appear to be going down by any discernable factor week on week. I'm certain it's nothing to worry about however for my own peace of mind I'd like to just confirm that the additional 11,000 pages are just old results that will eventually disappear from the index and that we're not generating any duplicate content. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a way to download a list of the 26,000 pages that Google has indexed so that I can compare it against our sitemap. Obviously I know about site:domain.com however this only returned the first 1,000 results which all checkout fine. I was wondering if anybody knew of any methods or tools that we could use to attempt to identify these 11,000 extra pages in the Google index so we can confirm that they're just old pages which haven’t fallen out of the index yet and that they’re not going to be causing us a problem? Thanks guys!
On-Page Optimization | | ChrisHolgate0 -
No index parts of a page?
Little bit of an odd question this, but how would one go about getting Google to not index certain content on a page? I'm developing an online store for a client and for a few of the products they will be stocking they will be using the manufacturers specs and descriptions. These descriptions and specs, therefore, will not be unique as they will be also used by a number of other websites. The title tag, onpage h1 etc will be fine for the seo of the actual pages (with backlinks, of course) so the impact of google not counting the description should be slight. I'm sure this can be done but for the life of me I cannot remember how. Thanks Carl
On-Page Optimization | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Changing of title page and description
Can I ask how long after changing the Title and Description tags on a website do people have to wait to see these changes reflected in Google? I changed a site of mine a couple of weeks back, pinged the site to google and had well over 5,000 googlebots to the page (not a result of pinging, I get that anyway), yet Google continues to display the old listing. Any secret techniques to speeding this up? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Has anyone with a high number of home page tiles been effected by the panda/farmer update?
One of the sites I'm working on seems to have dropped a few spots in rankings. It has numerous home page tiles, but they are not really advertising; just links to different sections on the site. Does anyone think that might be a factor in the rankings drop?
On-Page Optimization | | J.Marie0