Demoting a URL (not-WMT Related)
-
I have a pharmaceutical brand that treats two diseases, but wants to primarily promote one. We want searches for "brand dosing" to go to Side A, but currently "brand dosing" goes to Side B. BUT, I want "brand dosing Side B" to still show up in organic search, so a noindex on Side B, or canonicalization of Side A, won't work.
Essentially, I want any searches that are not specific to a disease treatment to go to Side A, and then specific Side B related searches, go to Side B.
Because this is a client paying me to optimize their site, I obviously want to optimize their whole site, so only optimizing Side A, or unoptimizing Side B, aren't solutions I want to employ.
I don't think a solution exists, but I figured my fellow Mozers would know best.
Thanks in advance,
-
Hey Eric,
Appreciate the positive attitude!
This is definitely a good jumping off point for my team and I. I only say that because pharma is heavily regulated so things like link building and branded social media are almost always disapproved. And content updates go through a lengthy legal process before they can be published.
We're already promoting the pages by using more internal links to Side A. But I still definitely like the attitude adjustment!
-
Christa, if you're not able (or don't to) use a canonical tag, then you're left to do a few things:
- optimize the site so that there are more internal links to the preferred page
- keep that page "fresh" by updating it's content on a regular basis
- get more links to that page from other sites
- get social media mentions and work on 'engagement' on social media that mentions the preferred page.
Don't think of it as 'demoting' one particular page, I would work heavily on promoting the preferred page so that it's stronger overall via social media and links.
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
-
What to do with dynamically translated content sharing same urls?
We've just added to an originally English website, Italian and German translations. User can switch between them with right hand drop down language selection menu; then the entire page will be translated (including menu, body, footer) but the urls remain the same. The Italian page have some meta data (titles and descriptions) translated as well. Is it going to be a significantly negative effect on SEO to have the translated pages sharing the same urls?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | D2i0 -
GSC is reporting a lot of chopped URLs
Recently, in the last two weeks, I started seeing a lot of odd 404 errors in GSC for my site. Upon investigation, the URLs are for fairly new articles, and the URLs are chopped in various places. From missing a character at the end to missing about 10 characters at the end of the URL. (an old similar issue is that GSC reports duplicate contents on weird subdomains that we've never used like 'smtp' 'ww1' or even random ones like 'bobo'.) GSC doesn't report any 'linked from' for those odd URLs and I know for sure these links aren't on the site itself. They're definitely not errors in the CMS. The site is a long established site (started 1997-1998) and we've been subject to a lot of negative SEO. I recently had to disavow about 1000 .ru domain linking to us, with some domains containing over a million link each. Could these chopped links be a new tactic of negative SEO? How do I find these seemingly intentionally broken links to us?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lazeez2 -
What to do with parameter urls?
We have a ton of ugly parameter urls that are coming up in google, in semrush, etc. What do we do with them? I know they can cause issues. EX https://www.hibbshomes.com/wp-content/themes/highstand/assets/js/cubeportfolio/js/jquery.cubeportfolio.min.js?ver=6.3
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stldanni0 -
Do you know if there is a tool that can tell you if a url have backlink?
Hi, Do you know if there is a tool that I can check backlinks for thousands of URLs Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut0 -
Does rewriting a URL affect the page authority?
Hi all, I recently optimized an overview page for a car rental website. Because the page didn’t rank very well, I rewrote the URL, putting the exact keyword combination in it. Then I asked Google to re-crawl the URL through Search Console. This afternoon, I checked Open Site Explorer and saw that the Page Authority had decreased to 1, while the subpages still have an authority of about 18-20. Hence my question: is rewriting a URL a bad idea for SEO? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiseDE
Lise0 -
Tagged URL ranking organically
I've noticed that one of our GA tagged urls are ranking organically & therefore is skewing the referral data. The campaign that we were tracking is no longer active but the link still works, but it's going to an old landing page. I asked our developers if we could redirect it but they said that it didn't work. Does anyone have some advise or a solution for this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Elihn0 -
URL or Domain length
Hi All, I am wondering if google still does give importance to the length of the domain or url. If yes then how much is the acceptable length of a domain and URL. Many Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
How can I block unwanted urls being indexed on google?
Hi, I have to block unwanted urls (not that page) from being indexed on google. I have to block urls like example.com/entertainment not the exact page example.com/entertainment.aspx . Is there any other ways other than robot.txt? If i add this to robot.txt will that block my other url too? Or should I make a 301 redirection from example.com/entertainment to example.com/entertainment.aspx. Because some of the unwanted urls are linked from other sites. thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VipinLouka780