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
-
Why Is this page de-indexed?
I have dropped out for all my first page KWDs for this page https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/dollies-load-movers-door-skates Can anyone see an issue? I am trying to find one.... We did just migrate to HTTPS but other areas have no problem
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Which is the best option for these pages?
Hi Guys, We have product pages on our site which have duplicate content, the search volume for people searching for these products is very, very small. Also if we add unique content, we could face keyword cannibalisation issues with category/sub-category pages. Now based on proper SEO best practice we should add rel canonical tags from these product pages to the next relevant page. Pros Can rank for product oriented keywords but search volume is very small. Any link equity to these pages passed due to the rel canonical tag would be very small, as these pages barely get any links. Cons Time and effort involved in adding rel canonical tags. Even if we do add rel canonical tags, if Google doesn't deem them relevant then they might ignore causing duplicate content issues. Time and effort involved in making all the content unique - not really worth it - again very minimal searchers. Plus if we do make it unique, then we face keyword cannibalisation issues. -- What do you think would be the optimal solution to this? I'm thinking just implementing a: Across all these product based pages. Keen to hear thoughts? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowork2140 -
Setting up the right Geo targeting/language targeting settings and not to brake the SEO
Hello the great Moz Community! Gev here from BetConstruct, a leading gaming and betting software provider in the world. Our company website is performing great on SERP. We have 20+ different dedicated pages for our 20+ softwares, event section, different landing pages for different purposes. We also run a blog section, Press section, and more... Our website's default language is EN. 4 months ago we opened the /ru and /es versions of the website! I have set the correct hreflang tags, redirects, etc.. generated correct sitemaps, so the translated versions started to rank normally! Now our marketing team is requesting different stuff to be done on the website and I would love to discuss this with you before implementing! There are different cases! For example: They have created a landing page under a url betconstruct.com/usa-home and want me to set that page as the default website page(ie homepage), if the user visits our website from a US based IP. This can be done in 2 different ways: I can set the /usa-home page as default in my CMS, in case the visitor is from US and the address will be just betconstruct.com(without /use-home). In this case the same URL (betconstruct.com) will serve different content for only homepage. I can check the visitor IP, if he is from US, I can redirect him to betconstruct.com/usa-home. In this case user can click on the logo and go to the homepage betconstruct.com and see the original homepage. Both of the cases seems to be dangerous, because in the 1st case I am not sure what google will think when he sees different homepage from different IPs. And in the 2nd case I am not sure what should be that redirection. Is it 301 or 303, 302, etc... Because Google will think I don't have a homepage and my homepage redirects to a secondary page like /usa-home After digging a lot I realised that my team is requesting from me a strange case. Because the want both language targeting(/es, /ru) and country targeting (should ideally be like /us), but instead of creating /us, they want it to be instead of /en(only for USA) Please let me know what will be the best way to implement this? Should we create a separate version of our website for USA under a /us/* URLs? In this case, is it ok to have /en as a language version and /us as a country targeting? What hreflangs to use? I know this is a rare case and it will be difficult for you to understand this case, but any help will be much appreciated! Thank you! Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | betconstruct
Gev0 -
Keep ranking homepage for target keyword, or switch to another page?
Hi Moz Community! I've researched Moz to find the answer to this question but nothing for my situation. I'm hoping some experienced SEOs can help me out. Here's the situation: I'm up against some fairly stiff competition for my main keyword - the front page is dominated by major manufacturers with high brand recognition and loads of money, where as my client is a much smaller manufacturer trying to compete. However, their DA is only 37-53 so not impossible to outrank... just many links and a significant advantage. We've honed in on a keyword that still drives good traffic, that's a great term to drive paying customers, and that we can get competitive with. My strategy was to attempt to rank my client's _homepage _for this term, rather than a specific product page, as I knew that they'd have many more links and social shares of their main site. (I've been successful with this strategy before). We've risen 60+ positions for the keyword in the past 3 months, to position 12, but we seem to have plateaued for the past month. We're ranking in top 5 positions for a number of our other keywords, so I know we're trending well. However, I'm concerned that despite our quick rise to #12, I may have made a seemingly fatal decision to rank their homepage for our target keyword term. After we had plateaued for a while, I did a more thorough side by side comparison and found that 8 out of 10 competitors on the front page have 2 main things we don't (and can't, because we're ranking the homepage)... 1- The keyword in the url (they're ranking for product pages, i.e. homepage.com/keyword-here/) 2- Their keyword comes first, or early in the meta title. Ours is _supposed to _, but as you know- Google can do what it likes with your homepage title as it's your brand, so they've put our company name- _then _the keyword we added in the title. e.g. Our Company | The Term We're Ranking For We've done a lot of work, and gained many reputable, high quality links, and we did see a significant rank increase across all our pages. My question is- did I shoot myself in the foot? Or is ranking the homepage still viable in this situation? If ultimately this is going to be impossible to get in the top #5 spots, what can I do to fix it? We've already gained a PA of 38 on the homepage from our work. Or would you let it go and just keep working at it, expecting that eventually we'll break onto the front page? Thanks in advance! Let me know if you need more info. I tried to be general with terms/site for my client's sake.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheatreSolutionsInc0 -
How does Googlebot evaluate performance/page speed on Isomorphic/Single Page Applications?
I'm curious how Google evaluates pagespeed for SPAs. Initial payloads are inherently large (resulting in 5+ second load times), but subsequent requests are lightning fast, as these requests are handled by JS fetching data from the backend. Does Google evaluate pages on a URL-by-URL basis, looking at the initial payload (and "slow"-ish load time) for each? Or do they load the initial JS+HTML and then continue to crawl from there? Another way of putting it: is Googlebot essentially "refreshing" for each page and therefore associating each URL with a higher load time? Or will pages that are crawled after the initial payload benefit from the speedier load time? Any insight (or speculation) would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mothner1 -
Can noindexed pages accrue page authority?
My company's site has a large set of pages (tens of thousands) that have very thin or no content. They typically target a single low-competition keyword (and typically rank very well), but the pages have a very high bounce rate and are definitely hurting our domain's overall rankings via Panda (quality ranking). I'm planning on recommending we noindexed these pages temporarily, and reindex each page as resources are able to fill in content. My question is whether an individual page will be able to accrue any page authority for that target term while noindexed. We DO want to rank for all those terms, just not until we have the content to back it up. However, we're in a pretty competitive space up against domains that have been around a lot longer and have higher domain authorities. Like I said, these pages rank well right now, even with thin content. The worry is if we noindex them while we slowly build out content, will our competitors get the edge on those terms (with their subpar but continually available content)? Do you think Google will give us any credit for having had the page all along, just not always indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | THandorf0 -
Product pages content
Hi! I'm doing some SEO work for a new client. I've been tasked with boosting some of their products, such as http://www.lawnmowersdirect.co.uk/product/self-propelled-rear-roller-rotary-petrol-lawnmowers/honda-hrx426qx. It's currently #48 for the term Honda Izy HRG465SD, while http://www.justlawnmowers.co.uk/lawnmowers/honda-izy-hrg-465-sd.htm is #2, behind Amazon. Regarding links, there's no great shakes between the pages or even the domains. However, there's major difference in content. I'm happy to completely revamp it, I just wanted to check I'm not missing anything out before starting to rewrite it altogether! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Page Indexed but not Cached
A section of pages on my site are indexed (I know because they appear in SERPs if I copy and paste a sentence from the content), however according to the text-only cached version of the page they are not being read by Google.Why are they indexed event hough it seems like Google is not reading them..... or is Google in fact reading this text even though it seems like they should not be?Thanks for your assistance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0