Landing page, or redirect? Looking for feedback.

[rachaelpracht]

If we have a section of our site that we have branded separately from the rest of the site, does it make sense to provide a landing page on our current, high authority site that has content and links off to the separate site, or would just a domain.com/keyword redirect to the page be a better route? Does it matter? I have an idea, but I'd like to get feedback on this.

We are a newspaper, http://billingsgazette.com and we have an auto branded site called http://montanawheelsforyou.com. The URL and branding is fubar. We're wondering if we can increase the ranking if we swapped out the http://billingsgazette.com/autos from a redirect to http://montanawheelsforyou.com to a landing page with content and a link to http://montanawheelsforyou.com.

[DannyHoodless]

Rachel,

• All the links going to /autos are telling Google that the page is valuable.

• Changing /autos to a landing page is then telling search engines that the landing page is valuable but it will require some work to gain some page authority.

• A link from this page will not bring as much link juice.

However, A link is usually more authoritative than a redirect.

Changing a redirect to a page might lose some juice.

I think the best solution is to create http://billingsgazette.com NEW PAGE NAME and use it as your new landing page, fill it with great content and link it in the menu with the old anchor text "Autos"

From this page, you can add a link to http://billingsgazette.com/autos using some cool anchor text.

I then recommend that you add a link DIRECTLY too http://www.montanawheelsforyou.com/ at the bottom of the page in Sites & partners with the anchor text Montana wheels.

[rachaelpracht]

Just to make sure I understand you, you're saying that if we created a landing page on Billingsgazette.com, which has high authority and is well-established, and put a link out to our newer MontanaWheelsForYou.com website that we are in return sending sweet sweet link juice from our established site to our new site. So, doing this could actually help as opposed to hinder.

Thanks for the feedback - it's 100% the kind I was looking for!

[RobertFisher]

Rachael,

Just for clarity (I actually had to draw this out to understand it): Current is BillingsGazette.com/autos 301's to MontanaWheelsForYou.com; correct?

You instead want to create a landing page for BillingsGazette.com/autos that has a link to MontanaWheelsForYou.com in order to increase ranking of MontanaWheelsForYou.com; correct?

If billingsGazette.com/autos Page redirects to MontanaWheelsForYou.com you are passing the link juice to the MontanaWheelsForYou.com page. If you create a new landing page say, billingsgazette.com/autos/landing-page and place a link to MontanaWheelsForYou.com, the new landing page will start with only the one link will not have the value that the older established page had in the beginning. Assuming that billingsgazette.com/autos also links to other pages, etc. the value of the link is: billings .../autos page divided by all the links leaving the page and each receives its share.

To make it easy, the redirect is sending all the value to the MontanaWheelsForYou.com page. So if the page billingsgazette.com/autos has a value of say 50 and you have 10 links, your new page would receive roughly a 5 value. And, if it has more than the link to the one page, the five would be divided again. So, from the landing page with value of 5 if more than the link to MontanaWheelsForYou.com then the value is less than five.

Hope that helps,

Robert