Has anyone experience with deoptimising a homepage to alter landing page?
-
Our home page is ranking for a group of search terms even though we have dedicated landings pages for them that have higher on-page scores. The home page is optimised for a base search term, i.e. "Product", and the landing pages for variations, so "Product Variation A", "Product Variation B" and so on. The home page has a slight higher PA than the intended landing pages. We are tempted to de-optimise the home page, however, the fear is that we simply lose our positions entirely.
Anyone tried this before?
THANKS
-
Good Answer received!
Thank you very much, and good luck with the landing pages!
-
...and Moz won't let me mark as a Good Answer - I will try again later!
-
Thank you Ria,
We've done exactly as you have outlined here, exact the PA for the landing pages is still lower than the homepage. Based on what you've said, I think we will try and achieve a higher PA for the landing pages first, before deoptimising the homepage.
Many thanks again
-
This is fine too. But when landing pages have a much higher conversion rate than the homepage for its target keywords, than naturally you will want the landing page to rank instead of the homepage. And in some cases I've found, as soon as the homepage is out of the picture the landing page is able to rank higher for the query than the homepage ever did.
So how much effort, if any, you'd put into doing this should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis really.
-
This happens with my sites for many keywords. When I see it, I spend a few moments go give thanks and then I get right back to work.
-
I've had this with a couple of clients' websites recently. What worked for me was to (in this order):
- Ensure that the landing pages are well optimised for the target keyword.
- Anchor text from other pages, including homepage, of the site make use of keyword.
- Build a couple of good links to each landing page.
- Watch and wait for landing pages to start climbing position a little in SERPs, even if not overtaking the homepage.
- De-optimise the homepage for the product variant keywords, keeping it broad only.
It seems too simple and straight forward, but this has worked twice for me now. Hopefully it works for you too. But I would be careful not to de-optimise the homepage if the landing pages are nowhere near within sight yet in the SERPs.
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
-
Why is my home page ranking much higher than my collection page?
Hi everyone, Why is my client's home page ranking high for a certain keyword phrase rather than a collection page I have which is well optimised for this keyword? The collection page is on the 10th SERPs page. I did see there were keywords used in the footer of page and the keyword was also used in some intro text on the home page so I removed the keyword from these two places nearly 2 weeks ago and requested google to reindex both the collection page and home page and I've not seen any improvement of the collection page's ranking in SERPs. I also changed the meta description and meta title as the ctr was poor but there wasn''t that many impressions either. It is a competitive keyword organically so maybe the collection page's authority is just not good enough compared to the competitors hence why they are choosing the home page as it has higher page authority however this still is not helpful to searchers who land on home page. Does anyone have any ideas of what else I can do to get google to rank the ocllection page higher for the keyword instead of home page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TZ19820 -
How can I identify links that point to a specific landing page with a specific anchor text on my own website?
I am trying to identify buttons and links that point to a specific landing page on our website that have a certain word in the anchor text and I would like to know the referring page URL too. Does anybody have an idea on how to do this? We have above a hundred landing pages and I would rather not go through them one by one 😄 Thanks for the help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 10to8-Moz0 -
Prioritise a page in Google/why is a well-optimised page not ranking
Hello I'm new to Moz Forums and was wondering if anyone out there could help with a query. My client has an ecommerce site selling a range of pet products, most of which have multiple items in the range for difference size animals i.e. [Product name] for small dog
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LauraSorrelle
[Product name] for medium dog
[Product name] for large dog
[Product name] for extra large dog I've got some really great rankings (top 3) for many keyword searches such as
'[product name] for dogs'
'[product name]' But these rankings are for individual product pages, meaning the user is taken to a small dog product page when they might have a large dog or visa versa. I felt it would be better for the users (and for conversions and bounce rates), if there was a group page which showed all products in the range which I could target keywords '[product name]', '[product name] for dogs'. The page would link through the the individual product pages. I created some group pages in autumn last year to trial this and, although they are well-optimised (score of 98 on Moz's optimisation tool), they are not ranking well. They are indexed, but way down the SERPs. The same group page format has been used for the PPC campaign and the difference to the retention/conversion of visitors is significant. Why are my group pages not ranking? Is it because my client's site already has good rankings for the target term and Google does not want to show another page of the site and muddy results?
Is there a way to prioritise the group page in Google's eyes? Or bring it to Google's attention? Any suggestions/advice welcome. Thanks in advance Laura0 -
Removing pages from index
My client is running 4 websites on ModX CMS and using the same database for all the sites. Roger has discovered that one of the sites has 2050 302 redirects pointing to the clients other sites. The Sitemap for the site in question includes 860 pages. Google Webmaster Tools has indexed 540 pages. Roger has discovered 5200 pages and a Site: query of Google reveals 7200 pages. Diving into the SERP results many of the pages indexed are pointing to the other 3 sites. I believe there is a configuration problem with the site because the other sites when crawled do not have a huge volume of redirects. My concern is how can we remove from Google's index the 2050 pages that are redirecting to the other sites via a 302 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tinbum0 -
Should we show(to google) different city pages on our website which look like home page as one page or different? If yes then how?
On our website, we show events from different cities. We have made different URL's for each city like www.townscript.com/mumbai, www.townscript.com/delhi. But the page of all the cities looks similar, only the events change on those different city pages. Even our home URL www.townscript.com, shows the visitor the city which he visited last time on our website(initially we show everyone Mumbai, visitor needs to choose his city then) For every page visit, we save the last visited page of a particular IP address and next time when he visits our website www.townscript.com, we show him that city only which he visited last time. Now, we feel as the content of home page, and city pages is similar. Should we show these pages as one page i.e. Townscript.com to Google? Can we do that by rel="canonical" ? Please help me! As I think all of these pages are competing with each other.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sanchitmalik0 -
410 pages
Do you need to optimize a 410 page like you do for 404 pages? What does a visitor see when a page is 410 compared to a 404?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Landing Page - Home Page redesign SEO factor question - Serious concern.
Hi Folks, I'm considering making a big change to our website and really need some expert advise. Will we lose ranking if we do what I propose? Our site www.meninkilts.com, needs to split users/clients by "Commercial" and "Residential" so we can message/market completely differently to each client. We are considering doing this structure: Landing Page | | Commercial Homepage Residential Homepage Right now we rank well, for our keywords like "Window Cleaning cityname" but are worried that adding a landing page, and splitting our site to two homepages will effect seo (ie: a landing page would only have two buttons: one for commercial and one for residential). What would be the best way to handle this. Looking forward to your insights! Cheers Brent
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MenInKilts0 -
Do in page links pointing to the parent page make the page more relevant for that term?
Here's a technical question. Suppose I have a page relevant to the term "Mobile Phones". I have a piece of text, on that page talking about "mobile phones", and within that text is the term "cell phones". Now if I link the text "cell phones", to the page it is already placed on (ie the parent page) - will the page gain more relevancy for the term "cell phones"?? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770