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
-
Google webcache of product page redirects back to product page
Hi all– I've legitimately never seen this before, in any circumstance. I just went to check the google webcache of a product page on our site (was just grabbing the last indexation date) and was immediately redirected away from google's cached version BACK to the site's standard product page. I ran a status check on the product page itself and it was 200, then ran a status check on the webcache version and sure enough, it registered as redirected. It looks like this is happening for ALL indexed product pages across the site (several thousand), and though organic traffic has not been affected it is starting to worry me a little bit. Has anyone ever encountered this situation before? Why would a google webcache possibly have any reason to redirect? Is there anything to be done on our side? Thanks as always for the help and opinions, y'all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TukTown1 -
When serving a 410 for page gone, should I serve an error page?
I'm removing a bunch of old & rubbish pages and was going to serve 410 to tell google they're gone (my understanding is it'll get them out of the index a bit quicker than a 404). I should still serve an error page though, right? Similar to a 404. That doesn't muddy the "gone" message that I'm giving Google? There's no need to 410 and die?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HSDOnline0 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
How to rank product pages?
Hi guys, Please advice me on something improving my product pages ranking. We are doing well for head terms, categories but not ranking for product pages. We have issues with product pages which I am think is hard to tackle. For instance we have duplicate products (different colors), duplicate content internally (colors) and from manufacturer websites. Product pages linked from sub-category i.e. Home > Category > Sub-Category (20 per page) using pagination for next 20 and so on. Product pages linked internally via widgets that says other Similar products, featured products etc. Another issue with our product pages is that we are using third party reviews platform and whenever users add reviews to product pages this platform creates an hyperlink to different anchors which is not relevant to product. Example - http://goo.gl/NUG652 Can somebody please give some advice on how to improve rankings for product pages. writing unique content for thousands of pages is not possible. Even our competitor not writing unique content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webmaster_SEO0 -
Page and Domain Authority
How much Page and Domain Authority we need to look for to secure a backlink.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ross254sidney0 -
Wordpress - Dynamic pages vs static pages
Hi, Our site has over 48,000 indexed links, with a good mix of pages, posts and dynamic pages. For the purposes of SEO and the recent talk of "fresh content" - would it be better to keep dynamic pages as they are or manually create static pages/ subpages. The one noticable downside with dynamic pages is that they arent picked up by any sitemap plugins, you need to manually create a separate sitemap just for these dynamic links. Any thoughts??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danialniazi1 -
What do you do with the page of a product that has been deleted?
As anyone know with an ecommerce website, products are constantly being added and removed. Once products are removed, the corresponding product pages are not reachable. Currently, I am redirecting to the Search page, if a product page is reached, whose corresponding product has been deleted. I am not sure if that is the correct, recommended technique from a SEO perspective. Should I try to show related products on the redirected page? Does anyone here know what is the best thing to do with this product page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amitramani0 -
On Page vs Off Page - Which Has a Greater Effect on Rankings?
Hi Mozzers, My site will be migrating to a new domain soon, and I am not sure how to spend my time. Should I be optimizing our content for keywords, improving internal linking, and writing new content - or should I be doing link building for our current domain (or the new one)? Is there a certain ratio that determines rankings which can help me prioritize these to-dos?, such as 70:30 in favor of link-building? Thanks for any help you can offer!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0