Linkbait outranks actual target page?
-
Interesting dilemma I've run into. Working in an extremely boring B2B space and started making some quality content to grab some .edu links. Well, it worked. Let's put it this way, our target keyword is "{keyword} services" and we pulled in so many .edu links the resource page which is an educational resource with our target keyword in it, has now surpassed every commercial site and ranks second. The problem is, the page doesn't have much in the way of services on it, it's strictly educational and targets a different audience than our customer. The home page, our desired landing page, jumps back and forth between third and twelfth depending on the week.
Any thoughts on how to make these flip flop? We're getting a ton of traffic to the wrong page and bouncing most of them at the moment.
-
should have mentioned we already have done this. thanks for the head's up, though.
-
The guys @dejanseo mentioned this via Twitter:
link to money page with a contextual kw anchor text from the juiced up page.
-
First to clarify:
Is the link bait on the same domain?
It sounds like the PA (page authority) of the link bait page is higher than that of the domain's home page. My suggestion would be:
- Try to redesign the home page to incorporate the link bait, even if it's at the bottom of the home page.
- Then 301 the linkbait page to the home page
-
Why add the content to the home page?
-
So that Google doesn't penalize you for not having the content your users wanted. If you link without duplicating the content it's grey hat.
SEO Moz was using this tactic back in 2006ish when Matt Inman worked at SEO Moz. They called it the "Link Bait and Switch"
-
So is this a page on your domain that is ranking ? Just making sure. So it's the wrong page ranking for the right keyword ? If yes, does it make sense to add a canonical tag on this wrong page to the right page, which is like a 301 and that should do it. The question is whether it makes sense in your case. Was this all naturally done...was it like a linkbait or an info graphic or a widget kind of something that brought these links ? Once you have these answers, you should be able to act on whether it's okay to do the canonical change. Let me low if that helps.
-
Reoptimize for a different keyword.
Then your desired page will rank at 12th or maybe 10th.
That is my prediction.
Instead of viewing this as a "problem" maybe you could figure out a way to get traffic from that #3 page into your desired page. If people don't want what is on that page it should be easy to funnel them to another page on your site. Now you have success.
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Outranking reasons
On the keyword Piedmont bike tours. How can this website https://goo.gl/hUnSUF (we are going to call it number 1) Be above this website https://goo.gl/6vG3D4 (we are going to call it number 2) I know number 1 is a big company but a few weeks back it was behind. Could someone let me why the number 1 is above number 2. Doesn't number 2 answer the people's questions ? what could be missing ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
If Penguin 2.0 targets specific pages and keywords, should I spend less SEO effort on them since will they be harder to optimize? Penalty repair is only starting at end of year.
I’m working with a company that got hit by Penguin 2.0. They’re going to switch to white-hat only for a few months and review analytics before considering repairing the penalty. In the meantime, would it make sense to focus less SEO effort (on-site optimization, link building, etc.) on any pages or keywords that were penalized or hit hardest? Or are those the pages we should work on the most? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Merge content pages together to get one deep high quality content page - good or not !?
Hi, I manage the SEO of a brand poker website that provide ongoing very good content around specific poker tournaments, but all this content is split into dozens of pages in different sections of the website (blog section, news sections, tournament section, promotion section). It seems like today having one deep piece of content in one page has better chance to get mention / social signals / links and therefore get a higher authority / ranking / traffic than if this content was split into dozens of pages. But the poker website I work for and also many other website do generate naturally good content targeting long tail keywords around a specific topic into different section of the website on an ongoing basis. Do you we need once a while to merge those content pages into one page ? If yes, what technical implementation would you advice ? (copy and readjust/restructure all content into one page + 301 the URL into one). Thanks Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tit0 -
Better UX or more Dedicated Pages (and page views)?
Hi, I'm building a new e-commerce site and I'm conflicting about what to do in my category pages. If we take for example a computer store.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
I have a category of laptops and inside there are filters by brand (Samsung, HP, etc.). I have two options - either having the brand choice open a new dedicated page -
i.e. Samsung-Laptops.aspx or simply do a JQuery filter which gives a better and faster user experience (immediate, animated and with no refresh). **Which should I use? (or does it depend on the keyword it might target)? **
Samsung laptops / dell laptops / hp laptops - are a great keyword on there own! By the way, splitting Laptops.aspx to many sub category physical pages might also help by providing the site with many actual pages dealing with laptops altogether.0 -
What constitutes a duplicate page?
Hi, I have a question about duplicate page content and wondered if someone is able to shed some light on what actually constitutes a "duplicate". We publish hundreds of bus timetable pages that have similar, but technically with unique urls and content. For example http://www.intercity.co.nz/travel-info/timetable/lookup/akl The template of the page is oblivious duplicated, but the vast majority of the content is unique to each page, with data being refreshed each night. Our crawl shows these as duplicate page errors, but is this just a generalisation because the urls are very similar? (only the last three characters change for each page - in this case /akl) Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BusBoyNZ0 -
1 of the sites i work on keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page
1 of the sites i work on (www.eva-alexander.com) keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page I have no idea why and have never experienced this before
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GMD10 -
Privacy policy page
I only link to my privacy policy page from the homepage, but the privacy policy page has a pr4, while the main domain has a pr5. Using site:domain name the policy page is at the top of the 2nd page of google so it ranks high. I was thinking of either nofollowing the link or adding a (noindex,follow) directive on the policy page, until I saw some seo professional sites using rel=canonical on their policy pages that points to their policy page itself. Am I better off using the (noindex,follow) or rel=canonical = policy page ? thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Flapjack0