Dealing with Redirects and iFrames - getting "product login" pages to rank
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One of our most popular products has a very authoritative product page, which is great for marketing purposes, but not so much for current users. When current users search for "product x login" or "product x sign in", instead of getting to the login page, they see the product page - it adds a couple of clicks to their experience, which is not what we want.
One of the problems is that the actual login page has barely any content, and the content that it does carry is wrapped around <iframes>. Due to political and security reasons, the web team is reluctant to make any changes to the page, and one of their arguments is that the login page actually ranks #1 for a few other products (at our company, the majority of logins originate from the same domain). </iframes>
To add to the challenge - queries that do return the login page as #1 result (for some of our other products) actually do not reference the sign-in domain, but our old domain, which is now a 301 redirect to the sign-in domain. To make that clear - **Google is displaying the origin domain in SERPs, instead of displaying the destination domain. **
The question is - how do we get this popular product's login page to rank higher than the product page for "login" / "sign in" queries? I'm not even sure where we should point links to at this point - the actual sign in domain or the origin domain?
I have the redirect chains and domain authority for all of the pages involved, including a few of our major competitors (who follow the same login format), and will be happy to share it privately with a Moz expert. I'd prefer not to make any more information publicly available, so please reach out via private message if you think you can help.
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Our software is web-based, hence the log in. One of customers' complaints has been the difficulty in finding the login page, so we wanted to make that easier for them. We've identified that over 70% of visitors to the product page are current customers looking to log in, so we'd like to save them a step by serving the log in page directly.
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Could you explain the business model a bit? If people can land directly on the product page, why do you want to take them to the log-in page? What are they logging into? Is the product an actual, physical product, or a service, SaaS, etc.? I realize you many not be able to provide all details, but if I can understand the business logic a bit, that would help. This is as much a business/conversion issue as a technical SEO issue.
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