301 Redirect to add juice from Keyword A to Keyword B
-
Here's our situation:
Our company sells Employee HANDBOOKS (the book that explains to employees how the company itself is run, more or less). That's the technically correct term for them. However, many people use this term interchangeably with Employee MANUALS. Employee MANUALS are actually slightly different. (they're more specific, usually a list of common office policies and procedures and how to do them)
When doing Keyword research, we learned that many, many people search for Employee MANUALS when they actually are interested in an employee HANDBOOK. We've got our page optimized for the Keyword Employee HANDBOOKS, because in our copy we always refer to it as such.
Here's my question: Would it be "cloacking" or some other blackhat nonsense if we did this:
#1. Take a copy of the current page, and make a second page for it with a slightly different URL, but optimize the SEO-relevant parts for the phrase Employee MANUAL.
#2. That page will also include a 301-redirect towards the original page, which is identical except the SEO bits are optimized for Employee HANDBOOKS.
My understanding here is that we'd get the SEO juice from the phrase Employee Manual, without actually having to do the upkeep on two different pages. We also avoid having to have a random page SEO optimized for an improper term just because of the general confusion about what the product is called.
Are we on the right track here? Or is this going to annoy Google, or not have the result I'm predicting? Any insight is appreciated!
-
Exactly this. Thanks Richard for explaining it in this way as well.
-
It looks like Google is aware of and has made this connection already. If you Google "employee manual" you will see that it actually bolds the term "handbook" as well. This usually indicates they can be used almost interchangeably in the content.
-
I would create the 301 redirect for the old pages to the most applicable new pages or home page, and create a custom 404. Those are always good to have and could also help explain the transition to your current strategy.
-
Fantastic, thank you sir. I've marked the question as answered and really appreciate your quick response. Could I trouble you for one more thing?
We'd already researched this, but since I may have failed to catch something important I want to make sure I'm not setting up a bad result.
We're currently migrating from one web design to another. It's all in WordPress but it's a new theme, templates, and all of that.
We have several links to content that is no longer particularly relevant or aligning with our current strategy. At first we felt it would be better to just not move them over, and design a friendly but generic 404 page that would alert people they may have tried to access something that's no longer there.
I suggested that instead of 404 (which I feel look bad, no matter how well they're designed) we should just transfer over the web page, but have them 301-redirect to our home page. I think that will be a slightly less jarring experience for them than seeing a 404 page. Either way, it will be a very small number of people who might still have access to a link for content so old/bad we don't really want it on our site anymore.
So in your opinion, is 404ing out or 301ing back to the home page the better option in our scenario? Or perhaps some third option I'm unaware of.
-
Right. Even though your business is technically about handbooks, doesn't mean you can't create some sort of campaign or widget or app or some sort of engagement piece that uses the term 'manual' instead and is targeted at individuals instead of corporate users.
You'll notice when you run some Google searches that they'll tag a result with synonyms as well as results missing certain precise search terms. This is due to the ability of Google to correlate meaning, intent, links, and more to such a high degree. The more you engage the higher you'll rank for both handbook and manual.
-
I'm not sure I followed your suggestion for an alternative, but thanks for your quick answer.
You're suggesting we simply try to obtain links to our site with anchor text mentioning both manuals and handbooks? I understand SEO value for the words in the anchor text will transfer that juice to the site it links to, but we are still in the process of building awareness, so a lot of our links back to our site are actually made by us. (When we submit content to various sites for them to post, we have the link to our site in the Author Bio section. When we post on social media, we're usually forced to use a bit.ly link due to Twitter character constraints.)
So if we advertise a "Free Handbook Review" program, we'd want to have SOME of the links back to our site have "manual" somewhere in the anchor text, in other words.
-
Hi Paul. Yes, this bit of work would be more gray/black than other straightforward methods, plus its benefits would be pretty minimal. What would be better is gaining links that use the terms interchangeably from outside sources. If people are searching for these terms as synonyms they will likely link in the same way. There would be several ways to go about this, like a "Make Your Manual" campaign that generates some links, PR around such, and so on. Cheers.
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
-
Redirects, 301's & 404's
I have tons of links that I have had added a redirect to after creating my companies new website. Is it bad to have all these 301s? How do I permanently redirect those links? Also, on Google Search Console it's telling me I have 1,000+ excluded links. Is this bad? Will it negatively affect me? Is this something to do with my sitemap? Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂
Technical SEO | | sammecooper0 -
Http -> https redirections / 301 the right way
Dear mozers, Thank you for your time reading the message and wanting to help! So, we have moved our WordPress to https and redirected all the content successfully via htaccess file. We used a simple 301 redirect plugin, which we are using to redirect old URLs to the new ones. The problem today is, the redirections in the plugin are not working for http version. Here is an example: htaccess redirect: http --> https Plugin redirect domain.com/old --> domain.com/new but, the url http://domain.com/old is not redirecting to https://domain.com/new while https://domain.com/old does redirects to https://domain.com/new What can you suggest as a solution? Thank you in advance! P.S. I don't think having 2 redirects for each version of the URL is the smartest solution Best wishes, Dusan
Technical SEO | | Chemometec0 -
301 Redirect
Hello Moz Community, I have a question regarding 301 redirecting a new domain that contains keywords relevant to my website. However, I do NOT want to change my current domain. My main question is, by just redirecting this new domain to my current website, will those keywords in the new domain help with ranking in anyway? Thanks in advance for any help!
Technical SEO | | WyzeOwl0 -
Crawl errors: 301 (permanent redirect)
Hi, here are some questions about SEO Crawl Diagnostics. We've recently found out this 301 (permanent redirect) errors in our website and we concluded that the two factors below are the causes. 1. Some of our URLs that has no / at the end is automatically redirected to the same URL but with / at the end. 2. For SEO reasons we have designed our website in a way that when we type in a URL it will automatically redirect to a more SEO friendly URL. For example, if one of the URLs is www.example.com/b1002/, it will automatically redirect to www.example.com/banana juice/. The question is, are these so significant for our SEO and needs to be modified? One of the errors in our blog was having too many on-page links. Is this also a significant error and if so, how many on-page links are recommended from the SEO perspective? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Glassworks0 -
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
Technical SEO | | sboelter0 -
Should I move x-cart installation or 301 redirect?
We have an existing e-commerce site built on x-cart. The default store location is www.site.com/store. The domain root however is just a static HTML page (currently using mainly graphics) and a nav menu. What would be a better option: 1. Move the install location to the root directory and get rid of the static HTML page. We would have to manually 301 redirect all the old pages to the new location. Not sure if there are negative implications with that. 2. Just optimize the HTML landing page? Seems like it is better to have products and categories as close to the root domain as possible... 3. 301 redirect the domain to www.site.com/store/ and optimize the homepage within the store. This option means we dont have to worry about 2000 redirects or the hassle of moving the store. Anyone had any experience with this and suggestions?
Technical SEO | | BlinkWeb0 -
How should 301 redirects affect Page Authority?
We recently setting up 301 redirects from one of our sites so that the site redirects from the www version to the non-www version for all pages. We want to quantify what we expect to see as results. From what the experts say, we'd expect that the Page Authority of the canonical versio (non-www) will be higher than either of the two separate ones were previously. For instance, if this page - www.website.com/information/ - had a PA of 57 and this one - website.com/information/ - had a PA of 53, some time after the 301 redirects from www to non-www have been put into place, we should see the non-www version of that page move up to some PA about 57. It our thinking correct? How long does it normally take to see a PA update take place in a scenario like this? Thanks, Richard
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0