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
-
My home page is not found by the "Grade a Page" tool
My home page as well as several important pages are not found by the Grade a Page tool. With our full https address I got this http://screencast.com/t/s1gESMlGwpa With just the www address I got this http://screencast.com/t/BMRHy36Ih https://www.joomlashack.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | etabush
https://www.joomlashack.com/joomla-templates We recently lost a lot of positions for our most important keyword: Joomla Templates Please help us figure this out. Whats screwy with our site?0 -
"Authorship is not working for this webpage" Can a company G+ page be both Publisher AND Author?
When using the Google Structured Data testing tool I get a message saying....... **Authorship Testing Result - **Authorship is not working for this webpage. Here are the results of the data for the page http://www.webjobz.com/jobs/ Authorship Email Verification Please enter a Google+ profile to see if the author has successfully verified an email address on the domain www.webjobz.com to establish authorship for this webpage. Learn more <form id="email-verification-form" action="http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets" method="GET" data-ved="0CBMQrh8">Verify Authorship</form> Email verification has not established authorship for this webpage.Email address on the webjobz.com domain has been verified on this profile: YesPublic contributor-to link from Google+ profile to webjobz.com: YesAutomatically detected author name on webpage: Not Found.Publisher | Publisher markup is verified for this page. |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webjobz
| Linked Google+ page: | https://plus.google.com/106894524985345373271 | Question - Can this company Google plus account "Webjobz" be both the publisher AND the author? Can I use https://plus.google.com/106894524985345373271 as the author of this and all other pages on our site? 98emVv70 -
What our peoples list from from 1 to 10 the most important "on page" Factors
we are all at different stages in our SEO and all have different skills and experiences would like to see if people have the same list or similar with this question.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReSEOlve0 -
Traffic drop off and page isn't indexed
In the last couple weeks my impressiona and clicks have dropped off to about half what it used to be. I am wondering if Google is punishing me for something... I also added two new pages to my site in the first week of June and they still aren't indexed. In the past it seemed like new pages would be indexed in a couple days. Is there any way to tell if Google is unhappy with my site? WMT shows 3 server errors, 3 Access denied, and 122 not found errors. Could those not found pages be killing me? Thanks for any advise, Greg www.AntiqueBanknotes.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Not sure why Home page is outranked by less optimized internal pages.
We launched our website just three weeks ago, and one of our primary keyword phrases is "e-business consultants". Here's what I don't get. Our home page is the page most optimized around this search phrase. Using SEOmoz On-Page Optimization tool, the home page scores an "A". And yet it doesn't rank in the top 50 on Google Canada, although two other INTERNAL pages - www.ebusinessconsultants.ca/about/consulting-team/ & /www.ebusinessconsultants.ca/about/consulting-approach/ - rank 5 & 6 on Google Canada, even though they only score a grade "C" for on-page optimization for this keyword phrase. I've always understood that the home page is the most powerful page. Why are these others outranking it? I checked the crawl and Google Webmaster, and there is no obvious problem on the home page. Is this because the site is so new? It goes against all previous experience I've had in similar situation. Any guidance/ insight would be highly appreciated!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0 -
Manage Ranking for " Out of Stock" pages
Hi, I own an e-commerce marketplace where the products are sold by 3rd party sellers and purchased by end users. My problem is that whenever a new product is added the search engine crawls the website and it ranks the new page on 4th page. when I start optimizing it to gain better rankings in search engines the product goes out of stock and the rankings drop to below 100. To counter that I started showing other related products on the "Out of Stock" pages but even then the rankings are dropping. Can someone help me with this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
No equivalent page to re-direct to for highly trafficked pages, what should we do?
We have several old pages on our site that we want to get rid of, but we don't want to 404 them since they have decent traffic numbers. Would it be fine to set up a 301 re-direct from all of these pages to our home page? I know the best option is to find an equivalent page to re-direct to, but there isn't a great equivalent.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Maximum of 100 links on a page vs rel="nofollow"
All, I read within the SEOmoz blog that search engines consider 100 links on a page to be plenty, and we should try (where possible) to keep within the 100 limit. My question is; when a rel="nofollow" attribute is given to a link, does that link still count towards your maximum 100? Many thanks Guy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Horizon0