Which page will rank higher, my main article or the sub article linking from it?
-
Hi all,
Can you help me figure this one out?
I'm currently creating content for my website and I very badly want to know which page will rank higher in Google, my main article that has some keywords that are and links to my sub-article, or my sub-article which is optimized for those keywords?
I will demonstrate with an example since I'm not sure my question is clear: If I have an article that talks about different kinds of candy and it links to a sub-article that will elaborate on specific candies like a mint candy ,which page will rank for mint candies.
Until today I believed that if my sub-article which is linked from my main-article will rank for mint candies since it gets the support from my main article.Lately when experimenting this I found my thoughts to be wrong.
Can anyone help me with this one?Any insights?
Thanks,
Leebi
-
Hey Ed,
thanks for clarifying this.
-
It's right what you say but i've seen some evidence that google is going even further now. It's about establishing what are the doorways into your site from the serps. Some people might be looking for just 'candy' and they may see your site in the serps. But probably not since that's supremely competitive.
So the most efficient way I've found is to divide all the content up into 'categories' or topics. So these could be toffees, mints, chews etc. Then you must take a view on what the user wants. Do you think there are people out there who want to see pages about only hard mints with soft mints on another page. Or have both of them on the same page. If you get too granular then you might fall foul of the new maccabees update that penalises for having loads of articles targeting keyword variations.
To give you an example from my business, I have veneers, dental implants, whitening and routine dentistry. Then on each of those pages I have before and afters, prices, procedure, and pretty much everything on there using H2's and schema to pick up specific queries in blue as hyperlinks in the serps.
Comprehensiveness is very important. If I want my pages to rank they must include EVERYTHING users want to know about that thing. So for 'mint candy' i'll want to see hard, soft, sugar free etc etc.
Always be testing. I've had success incorporating reports and videos into the pages too. So you could have a report about how your candy is made or a commercial from a mint candy company or whatever.
But most important is to model the topics of the high performing competitors and be comprehensive and helpful and answer the query. Don't worry too much about internal linking so long as the links are natural, use anchor text and obey your structure and hierarchy of topics.
My home page doesn't rank for anything. But we make millions of pounds a year from our Veneers, Implants and Whitening pages. So maybe you need to focus less on the homepage.
-
Thanks for your time Egol!
-
Google uses a lot of factors to determine which page or pages of a website will rank for a specific keyword. To make a very simple example, which is probably realistic in most situations, we can attribute the ranking of a webpage for Keyword X mainly to two factors: the strength of the page, and the optimization of the page for the specific keyword.
Let's assume that Google uses (strength * optimization).
By that, a weak page with perfect optimization, could be outranked by a strong page with weak optimization. This is probably what you are seeing on your site right now.
Most sites have homepages that are stronger than interior pages, so seeing the homepage outrank an interior page is not uncommon. It is expected to happen a lot. When it happens for you, it means that your interior page doesn't have the strength to compete, and in that situation you should give thanks that your homepage is ranking because otherwise your interior page would be buried.
You should give thanks for another reason. When your interior page gets strong enough to rank on the first page, you will probably have a double listing (two pages on the first page of the SERPs for that query).
If you want to change this outcome, the best work to do is to get more internal and external links into your interior page to improve its strength.
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
-
Google Is Ranking the Wrong Page
Howdy Folks- I have a case where Google is ranking the wrong page for a couple of different keywords. The home page is: http://healthtn.com Most notably, we're trying to optimize the home page for "Tennessee Health Insurance" but the below page is what continually ranks for it, and does so very poorly. We used to be page two with the home page, now we are page four and it ranks the following page. http://healthtn.com/tennessee/health-insurance/student I have started directing our Internal Linking to reflect the correct anchor text but succeeded in losing ranking for the term, but am still ranking the wrong page. Any thoughts or help would be much appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | CRO_first0 -
Will pushing a visitor to a conversion page hosted on a 3rd-party domain hurt the landing page ranking
Had an interesting question from a client. The client has a page that is optimized for a specific term. The goal of the page is to push users to sign-up for a trial. The trial registration (conversion) page is hosted by a third-party. Will pushing users to the conversion page cannibalize the SEO authority of the landing page. My reflexive answer is to say no, but now am not so sure.
On-Page Optimization | | infoblue0 -
Will a on-page food/drink menu take away from my target keywords?
I am trying to rank for Chicago corporate events, so I am writing new content for a landing page. I have a description of our venue and why one should have a corporate event there, all content that is very rich in corporate event keywords. I then go on to say our drink packages and food packages. Overall, my actual keyword targeted content is 1/5 of the content and the other 4/5 is menu. At first I thought the more content the better, but now that I realize a lot fo the content is just saying different foods and alcohols I'm questioning my strategy. I'm going to do my metas and h1s and stuff with corporate event keywords. But is the menu going to get in the way of ranking for the corporate event keywords? Thanks in advance 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | howlusa0 -
Trying to run page reports, but the system will not grab the latest changes to grade ?
I am trying to improve my page grades, however the system seems not not grab the latest updated fixed page, Please help. My Page is : http://pizza.codiedog.com/Best-Italian-Restaurant-in-San-Diego/index.shtml
On-Page Optimization | | dennislanglais0 -
Disallow a spammed sub-page from robots.txt
Hi, I have a sub-page on my website with a lot of spam links pointing on it. I was wondering if Google will ignore that spam links on my site if i go and hide this page using the robots.txt Does that will get me out of Google's randar on that page or its useless?
On-Page Optimization | | Lakiscy0 -
Does link text "more information" have more weight than a normal link?
Does the anchor text "more information" hold any additional weight than any other anchor text? My suspicion is no, but just wanted to confirm.
On-Page Optimization | | nicole.healthline0 -
Are Forum Links To Website Causing Rankings To Drop ?
For many years our top keywords hve ranked in top 5. Usually top 3 for a few in particular. The last few months those particular keywords have dropped to 25 +. Our other rankings are doing pretty decent and are remaiing the same. We are members of about 6 forums since they relate to our website and sometime we have contests on them. I do know that the forums are based on those particular keywords and are linking to our website, as well as other forum members linking to us. Each forum has roughly 300 links to our website. It does not seem as if our competitors are affected by this, as they are members of the forums as well. What could be causing this for these certain keywords? If those forums were affected by Google's new algorythm would this have an affect on our website?
On-Page Optimization | | hfranz0 -
Tag clouds: good for internal linking and increase of keyword relevant pages?
As Matt Cutts explained, tag clouds are OK if you're not engaged in keyword stuffing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYPX_ZmhLqg) - i.e. if you're not putting in 500 tags. I'm currently creating tags for an online-bookseller; just like Amazon this e-commerce-site has potentially a couple of million books. Tag clouds will be added to each book detail page in order to enrich each of these pages with relevant keywords both for search engines and users (get a quick overview over the main topics of the book; navigate the site and find other books associated with each tag). Each of these book-specific tag clouds will hold up to 50 tags max, typically rather in the range of up to 10-20. From an SEO perspective, my question is twofold: 1. Does the site benefit from these tag clouds by improving the internal linking structure? 2. Does the site benefit from creating lots of additional tag-specific-pages (up to 200k different tags) or can these pages become a problem, as they don't contain a lot of rich content as such but rather lists of books associated with each tag? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | semantopic0