Deeper Levels = Lower Page Authority?
-
After migrating 8 sites into one last year, which went quite successfully, we're now looking into SEO much deeper and how we can improve overall.
Something I have noticed is the deeper the pages, the longer the url, the lower the page authority. It almost halves for each level the page gets deeper.
Is this true? And if so how can we combat this?
I know content is key, but is there anything else we can do?
Many thanks
-
Hi Harry,
I changed the status to "Discussion", because - as a moderator - I consider that the answers summed up substantially offer you a solution, but - as it is quite common in SEO - there is space for further discussion.
Moreover, the "discussion" status may attract more people into offering valuable opinions.
-
Is there a way I can mark this question back to unanswered as I still feel we haven't reached a definite conclusion?
Thanks!
-
Thank you all for your answers.
I'll try and respond to some of your questions:
-
Yes Domain Authority - This was high on the old sites and now has dropped since moving what was a home page to now a level 1 sub home page (e.g. website.com/this-was-a-home-page). The old DA was lower than the PA but not by much. Overall though it seems we have lost a lot of DA. The domain name its self has changed, but it's almost like not much DA has been brought across.
-
Backlinks - Since we had 8 different businesses with 8 different websites, they linked to each other which created most of our backlinks. We have asked for other backlinks we had that came from the brand website themselves to be changed, but unfortunately a lot of the brands we represent will not link to us directly. We have also updated any sites like DMOZ with our new address.
-
Home page links - Every page links back to it's corresponding brand home page, as well as the overall home page.
-
We have many internal links and strong navigation allowing you to go to almost anywhere with just 1 or 2 clicks. Our urls don't go deeper than 3 levels.
Just an overview of our site structure which may help:
Overall company home page
Brand A home | Brand B home | Brand C home etc... For 8 brands
Brand A content | Brand B content | Brand C content etc...
Brand A subcontent | Brand B subcontent | Brand C subcontent etc...To put it in context of real estate:
Our company overview home page
Apartments | Houses | Mansions | Holiday Homes
Info about our apartments | info about our houses | info about our mansions | info about our holiday homes
Info about individual apartments | info about individual houses | info about individual mansions | info about individual holiday homesAll with the ability to jump between these categories easily.
Thank you for all your help so far, I hope the above helps you to help us further!
Many thanks
-
-
Apart the two good answers here above, your situation explains why one of the most important (and sadly forgotten) facets of on-site SEO is Internal Linking.
Be always sure to create justified opportunities for internally linking your deepest levels for your strongest upper ones.
For instance, we usually see in the home page that real estates are presented in different ways:
- New appartments;
- Most viewed;
- Most reviewed (if you offer a way to "thumb up"/review/star them
- etc etc
What we almost never see is using this way of showing "products" on a category and sub-category level. That method, though, would help you giving a strong internal link, which will make stronger the apartments pages that matters the most for your business, because those internal links let the bots to "jump" directly to the apartment's page without the need to pass through too many levels.
That is also one the functions of what I define as topical hub, about what I talked in the WBF linked by Dirk in his comment.
-
Thanks for citing my WBF Dirk!
About your doubt, Harry, there are few things that are not that clear:
- Do the migrated domains had a strong home page PA, but a not so strong DA? Or the contrary (stronger DA than home page PA);
- When the migration had been done, how the backlinks of the migrated domains were treated? Did you ask to update at least the most relevant ones so to point to the new URLs, or you just considered that 301 would have solve this facet of the migration?
I ask this because if the migration was correct in every facet, and the home pages were strong, than the PA of the new "home pages" on level 1 should be almost the same.
On the other hand, DO NOT confuse PA with PageRank. They are two very different metrics, as PageRank calculates just the value offered by all the links (internal and external) pointing to a URL, while PA consider also other things (on-page, for instance).
A loss in PR is quite normal, because the new internal linking (links toward deeper levels, but also the link toward the new home page), are redistributing PR (and possibly PA in how PA works) so that a 1:1 coincidence between old situation and new is almost impossible.
-
What Dirk says is right, but there are ways to improve authority. Make sure you have a link on all of the new subsite pages to its corresponding "home" page. You'll also want to update any backlinks that pointed to the old home pages to point to the new subpage.
-
Hi Dirk,
Thank you for your reply.
Our problem is that all our our second levels used to be individual websites with DA and PA of around 25-30. Now however after the migration, what used to be the home pages of individual sites are now 1 level down from the domain and have lost a huge amount of authority.
Is there something we've done wrong or is this simply what happens when merging lots of sites into one? What was the home page with high DA and PA is now much lower due to being a subfolder.
Thanks!
-
It would be quite logical. Compare it with real estate. Your primary location is your homepage -which normally will list your most important & interesting content. As you normally cannot put everything on your home, you shift less important content to level 2, and then 3 ..etc. The deeper the content - the less important you find it. So it's quite normal that Google follows this logic as well.
The second part is the number of internal links - because your most important content will receive a lot of internal links. Normally - the more links a piece of content receives, the closer it will be to the homepage (chances are bigger it receives links from the home, level 2 or level 3 content).
Index pages can help to move your content closer to the home - but this will only get you so far (this doesn't change a lot to the number of links these articles receive).
You could try to regroup your content in a cluster per theme - with it's own homepage & a lot on links inside the cluster to create more internal (theme based links) & move content closer to the home. There is an interesting post on this topic from Gianluca Fiorelli: http://moz.com/blog/topical-hubs-whiteboard-friday
Hope this helps,
Dirk
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
-
Category Page Outranks Homepage
I have an online party store and when I search for broad industry terms: (party supplies & party decorations) I notice that one of my category pages outranks the homepage. The homepage's Page Authority is better and more external links pointing to the homepage. Is there s technical SEO problem? Why would a category page outrank the homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PartyStore0 -
Duplicate page title at bottom of page - ok, or bad?
Can I get you experts opinion? A few years ago, we customized our pages to repeat the page title at the bottom of the page. So the page title is in the breadcrumbs at the top, and then it's also at the bottom of the page under all the contents. Here is a sample page: bit.ly/1pYyrUl I attached a screen shot and highlighted the second occurence of the page title. Am worried that this might be keyword stuffing, or over optimizing? Thoughts or advice on this? Thank you so much! ron ZH8xQX6
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Keywords going to Subdomain instead of targeted page(general landing page)
Why are some of my keywords going to subdomains instead of the more general/targeted landing page. For example, on my ecommerce website, the keyword 'tempurpedic' is directing to the subdomain URL of a specific tempurpedic product page instead of the general landing page. The product has a page authority of 15 and the Tempurpedic landing pages with all the products has an authority of 31. I have also noticed that my 'furniture stores in houston' keyword directs to my "occasional tables" URL! instead of a the much more targeted homepage. Is there something I am missing here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nat88han0 -
Multiple Author Rich Snippets On A Q&A Forum Page
Hi, I work on a site that has a robust q&a forum. Members post questions and other members answer the questions. The answers can be lengthy, often by experts with Google+ pages and almost always by multiple member/commenters answering a particular question. Much like Moz's forum here. In order to get rich snippets results in search for a single Q&A page, what would happen if each of, for instance, 10 commenters on a page, were tagged as author? After all, the q/a forum pages have many authors, each as author of their own comments. Or, should I pick one comment out of many and call that member/commenter the author or something else? If it matters, the person asking the question in the forum is almost always not the expert providing a ton of detailed content. Also, a question might be 8 words. One answer might be 25 to 500 or more and their might be 5 to 10 different answers. Thanks! Cheers... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Home page not being indexed
Hi Moz crew. I have two sites (one is a client's and one is mine). They are both Wordpress sites and both are hosted on WP Engine. They have both been set up for a long time, and are "on-page" optimized. Pages from each site are indexed, but Google is not indexing the homepage for either site. Just to be clear - I can set up and work on a Wordpress site, but am not a programmer. Both seem to be fine according to my Moz dashboard. I have Webmaster tools set up for each - and as far as I can tell (definitely not an exper in webmaster tools) they are okay. I have done the obvious and checked that the the box preventing Google from crawling is not checked, and I believe I have set up the proper re-directs and canonicals.Thanks in advance! Brent
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EchelonSEO0 -
Site less than 20 pages shows 1,400+ pages when crawled
Hello! I’m new to SEO, and have been soaking up as much as I can. I really love it, and feel like it could be a great fit for me – I love the challenge of figuring out the SEO puzzle, plus I have a copywriting/PR background, so I feel like that would be perfect for helping businesses get a great jump on their online competition. In fact, I was so excited about my newfound love of SEO that I offered to help a friend who owns a small business on his site. Once I started, though, I found myself hopelessly confused. The problem comes when I crawl the site. It was designed in Wordpress, and is really not very big (part of my goal in working with him was to help him get some great content added!) Even though there are only 11 pages – and 6 posts – for the entire site, when I use Screaming Frog to crawl it, it sees HUNDREDS of pages. It stops at 500, because that is the limit for their free version. In the campaign I started here at SEOmoz, and it says over 1,400 pages have been crawled…with something like 900 errors. Not good, right? So I've been trying to figure out the problem...when I look closer in Screaming Frog, I can see that some things are being repeated over and over. If I sort by the Title, the URLs look like they’re stuck in a loop somehow - one line will have /blog/category/postname…the next line will have /blog/category/category/postname…and the next line will have /blog/category/category/category/postname…and so on, with another /category/ added each time. So, with that, I have two questions Does anyone know what the problem is, and how to fix it? Do professional SEO people troubleshoot this kind of stuff all of the time? Is this the best place to get answers to questions like that? And if not, where is? Thanks so much in advance for your help! I’ve enjoyed reading all of the posts that are available here so far, it seems like a really excellent and helpful community...I'm looking forward to the day when I can actually answer the questions!! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K.Walters0 -
Embedded mobile page?
I have a client who wants a mobile version of their homepage. Normally, I use responsive design to accomplish this for the SEO benefit, but in this case the client wants very different information on the mobile home page than their regular home page. I don't want to go to a dedicated mobile version of the page because they get a fair amount of mobile traffic and so it would probably have a significant negative impact on their SEO to do so. So I was thinking I would add a hidden div to the home page which includes everything they want on the mobile home page and then use CSS to hide the regular content and show the hidden content if someone reaches the page from a smart phone. What do you think about this idea? Would I run afoul of Google's anti-cloaking "rules"? Has anyone done something like this before? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | farlandlee0 -
404 Redirecting to the home page
One of my clients that is managing their own server and website recently moved servers. Which then broke their custom 404 page. Instead of fixing this or putting the site back to the old server they redirected the 404 to the home page. I've been working on getting their 404's appropriately redirected, or old urls redirection using a 301 for a month or two. I read the HTTP Status Codes best practices. It just discusses usability. What technical seo back lash can happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | triveraseo0