Landing pages "dropping" and being replaced with homepage?
-
Hi Moz People
Happy new year to all, I have an interesting one here.
I have recently been making some landing pages and they have all pretty much hit page 1 for the search terms I've focused on (UK Domain).
Up until this morning the landing page was the 8th organic result on the UK domain. However I have checked this morning and the landing page has dropped below the top 50 and instead our homepage is now showing as the last organic result on page 1.
This is intriguing to me as it has also happened to a couple of other landing pages I have made. Is this due to the relevance being driven higher by the landing pages but overall the homepage is more important to Google? Do you guys think this might start happening to the other pages that I have created? Any input would be appreciated!
( Ill give you links and search terms if you want to take a look for yourselves but I try to refrain from "self advertising" )
Happy Thursday Mozzers !
- Jamie
-
Hi Richard
Good shout, after doing some research it looks as though the page that has now been replaced with the homepage actually got 100% CTR for a search term that isn't really relevant to our service. Only 1 click though.
However the relevant searches did get a good few impressions but didn't get a single click. I guess that is going to have something to do with the sudden change.
Seems a bit harsh to take action with only 1 click ...
-
In cases where there are multiple relevant pages, Google can show different ones. Drill down in Webmaster Tools under search queries and click one of the terms. You will see how often each page is shown as well as how often the results were returned in different positions.
-
Hi Amelia
Interestingly the bounce rate for the page that has dropped is lower than the Homepage. Landing page has a 25% bounce rate while the Homepage is 26.46%.
Average time on page is slightly lower than the Homepage. The only issue here is this was a relatively new landing page and there are older ones that are actually ranking higher with much higher bounce and exit rates. In fact one of the pages that has been ranked #3 for the past month has a bounce rate of over 60%!
The only trend I am noticing is the "time on page" being higher on the landing pages that haven't been effected. I guess this is coming down to a user engagement issue as you suggest. I'll try some more provocative wording to see if that helps although now there will be little to no clicks on the effected landing pages as they have dropped so low!
Thank you for your thoughts
**** UPDATE
After doing a little more comparison it appears that the time on page theory has no weight either as the high ranking pages all have pretty low time on page also... back to the think tank lol.
-
Google 'tests' landing pages quite a lot actually. I'd have a poke around in your analytics programme and see what the bounce rate, time on site, pages per visit for each landing page. If the homepage is performing better in these areas than your landing pages then that may be why this is happening. Also look in your webmaster tools at organic CTR - if the homepage has a higher CTR then Google is assuming it's more relevant for the query.
My hunch is that this is the issue - once you've got the comparison data you can look at ways of making your landing pages better for user engagement.
Good luck,
Amelia
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
-
Does redirecting from a "bad" domain "infect" the new domain?
Hi all, So a complicated question that requires a little background. I bought unseenjapan.com to serve as a legitimate news site about a year ago. Social media and content growth has been good. Unfortunately, one thing I didn't realize when I bought this domain was that it used to be a porn site. I've managed to muck out some of the damage already - primarily, I got major vendors like Macafee and OpenDNS to remove the "porn" categorization, which has unblocked the site at most schools & locations w/ public wifi. The sticky bit, however, is Google. Google has the domain filtered under SafeSearch, which means we're losing - and will continue to lose - a ton of organic traffic. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this, and appeal the decision. Unfortunately, Google's Reconsideration Request form currently doesn't work unless your site has an existing manual action against it (mine does not). I've also heard such requests, even if I did figure out how to make them, often just get ignored for months on end. Now, I have a back up plan. I've registered unseen-japan.com, and I could just move my domain over to the new domain if I can't get this issue resolved. It would allow me to be on a domain with a clean history while not having to change my brand. But if I do that, and I set up 301 redirects from the former domain, will it simply cause the new domain to be perceived as an "adult" domain by Google? I.e., will the former URL's bad reputation carry over to the new one? I haven't made a decision one way or the other yet, so any insights are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaiaslastlaugh0 -
Google webcache of product page redirects back to product page
Hi all– I've legitimately never seen this before, in any circumstance. I just went to check the google webcache of a product page on our site (was just grabbing the last indexation date) and was immediately redirected away from google's cached version BACK to the site's standard product page. I ran a status check on the product page itself and it was 200, then ran a status check on the webcache version and sure enough, it registered as redirected. It looks like this is happening for ALL indexed product pages across the site (several thousand), and though organic traffic has not been affected it is starting to worry me a little bit. Has anyone ever encountered this situation before? Why would a google webcache possibly have any reason to redirect? Is there anything to be done on our side? Thanks as always for the help and opinions, y'all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TukTown1 -
Best way to link to 1000 city landing pages from index page in a way that google follows/crawls these links (without building country pages)?
Currently we have direct links to the top 100 country and city landing pages on our index page of the root domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
I would like to add in the index page for each country a link "more cities" which then loads dynamically (without reloading the page and without redirecting to another page) a list with links to all cities in this country.
I do not want to dillute "link juice" to my top 100 country and city landing pages on the index page.
I would still like google to be able to crawl and follow these links to cities that I load dynamically later. In this particular case typical site hiearchy of country pages with links to all cities is not an option. Any recommendations on how best to implement?0 -
Portfolio Image Landing Page Question/Issue
Hello, We have a client with a very image heavy website. They have Portfolio pages with a large number of images. We are currently working on adding more copy to the site but wanted to confirm we are taking the right approach for the images on the site. Under the current structure each image has its own landing page (with no copy) and is fed in (or generated on) to a Portfolio Page. While we know this is not ideal as it would be best to have the images on the Portfolio Page directly or even fill out the landing pages with copy; due to the amount of images and the fact these are only images (and not a 'targeted' page) that would not really be feasible. Aside from the thin content concern these individual landing pages were being indexed so they are showing hundreds of pages on their sitemap.xml and in GSC even though they only have a few actual pages. In the meantime we went into each image-page and placed a canonical tag back to the main Portfolio Page (with the hopes to add content to that page and have it as the ‘overarching’ page). Would this be the right approach? – We considered ‘noindex-follow’ tags but would want the images to be crawled; the issue is because the pages are not on the actual page are we canonicalizing these images to nothing? Any insight would really be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R0 -
Only ranking well when "UK" is added to search term
Hi, what does it mean when a lot of our keyword phrases rank only when "UK" is typed in the search term? For example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Solid_Web
"boxes" (not in top 50)
"boxes UK" (38) "big storage boxes" (45)
"big storage boxes UK" (33) We haven't attempted to SEO the pages for search terms with "UK" appended to them. Our domain is a co.uk domain. So, what reasons could there be that are we ranking in such a way?0 -
Pagination on a product page with reviews spread out on multiple pages
Our current product pages markup only have the canonical URL on the first page (each page loads more user reviews). Since we don't want to increase load times, we don't currently have a canonical view all product page. Do we need to mark up each subsequent page with its own canonical URL? My understanding was that canonical and rel next prev tags are independent of each other. So that if we mark up the middle pages with a paginated URL, e.g: Product page #1http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692"/>http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=2" />**Product page #2 **http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=2"/>http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692" />http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=3" />Would mean that each canonical page would suggest to google another piece of unique content, which this obviously isn't. Is the PREV NEXT able to "override" the canonical and explain to Googlebot that its part of a series? Wouldn't the canonical then be redundant?Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Don340 -
Disabling a website - What to do with "link juice"?
Hi I built a website for a client a long time ago now and for a number of reasons I have decided to shut down the website. None payment being one of the reasons! My question to all you SEO guru's out there is, what should I do with 301 redirects. The site is an e-commerce based website and my personal website is simply advertising my services and portfolio. If I 301 redirect all the traffic from the customer website, will there be any issue with Google (or any search engine) seeing that my website is receiving traffic for search phrases such as "Coffee Mugs"? I.e. abolutely no relevance at all to my website content! My worry is my site could be penalised for a flurry of thousands of redirected links. Also, if I redirect everything to my site and the customer decides to pay the bill in due course, I will then remove the redirects - I guess this will have a massive impact on the rankings of the site? Thanks for reading and any advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yousayjump0 -
Massive 40-50 page drop for primary keyphrase, no apparent reason, + map listing weirdness
Hi. I manage the site http://physiowinnipeg.com, which has had some interesting yo-yo effects lately, culminating in a 40-50 page drop as of last Friday. The phrase in question: physiotherapy winnipeg Background: The site has ranked on the first page for this keyphrase since about May There was the occasional blip where the homepage would disappear from rankings altogether for a day or two, and then return back to its regular listing This would coincide with a sudden increase in organic places listings (our site would hit the top of the local map listings, but the homepage would vanish) Other pages would still appear for the target phrase, just not the homepage About a month ago, the organic places listing settled, and the homepage permanently vanished Other pages still ranked high, and we commanded many of the listings on the first 10 pages of Google, first page included The homepage would still appear for some other searches We had been affected by the Google Places --> Google+ Local transition, so I was of the opinion that we needed to wait it out a bit to see if it, like the other issues related to the transition, would work itself out This time around, it worked itself out again, just today -- but we are now ranked slightly lower on the first page and our Google local listing has disappeared (again) Our other pages are still (currently) absent from the first few pages, for this keyphrase The main differences I noticed here, aside from the much longer timeframe of our drop, was that other pages disappeared as well, and that the homepage was actually found, between page 38 and 50, depending on the day According to SEO Moz and other tools, the site is doing pretty much everything right. I should note, however, that there is a service we use for educational content called Patientsites that loads in the subdomain http://education.physiowinnipeg.com -- and this site has pulled many warnings in SEO Moz (around 10,000, actually, mostly long URL related), as well as a few errors. I'm not sure if this is a part of the problem, but I am considering having the content of the subdomain blocked via robots.txt and Webmaster Tools. Has anyone else experienced anything similar, or have any insight? This weirdness has gone on too long. Thanks! Bobby
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PinnacleWpg0
