Does Unique Content Need to be Located Higher on my webpages?
-
I have 1 page that ranks well with unique written content located high up on page (http://www.honoluluhi5.com/new-condos-in-honolulu/). I struggle to rank for 200+ other pages where unique content requires scrolling (ex: http://www.honoluluhi5.com/oahu/honolulu-homes/). I am thinking to do as follows:
- Change layout of all my pages to have unique content higher on page
- When users are on my site (not coming from search engines) and use my search filters, then users will land on pages where unique content is lower on page (so keep this layout: http://www.honoluluhi5.com/oahu/honolulu-homes/). I will then add these pages to my robots.txt file so they do not show in Google's index. Reason: unique content lower on page offers best user experience.
With unique content higher on page, I expect bounce rate to increase about 10% (based on the 1 page I have with unique content higher), but I think it is worthwhile, as I am sure search engines will start having my pages rank higher.
-
follow backlinks. site artchitecture and quality of content way above competition. I see businesses buying up 100+ keyword rich domains and ranking well for all domains. It tells me 2 things: 1) search engines are not always that clever, 2) I need to be patient, because of 1).
-
Google has not stated anything saying that is is harder for new websites to rank quickly, and I doubt that they would implement something like that into their alogorithm. The reason is it harder for a new website to rank is due to the lack of backlinks and ciatation sources. Without a history, it's harder for Google to see if a website is better or worse than others. This is why they place such a high prioroity on backlinks, as it tells them a broad picture of how trustworthy a site or domain really is. This is one of many factors, but its an important one to consider.
You stated that you have backlinks, have you checked to see if all of them are followed? If the link is not followed, it will only help to direct traffic at your site, not pagerank or weight.
I know a lot of people say this, but focus on laying out your page in a way that will help the user. Moving all your text higher up on the page will not make a magic improvement in your ranking, and I fear that you will spend a lot of time modifying and not get the results you want. Spend time creating really nice listing pages, and having other sites link back to them. Focus on gaining high quality relationships with real estate sites that have authority in the eyes of consumers, and in search engines. Look at large sites that are already successful in search results, and see what you can learn from them. We wrote an article a while back about analyzing your competitors SEO strategy. Might be worth a read for you. Focus on the content of your site, improving the conversion messages, improving the keyword density, and your overall message.
Thats where I would start
-
thanks for the answer. "...placement of the content (above the fold, bellow the fold ..) it's important for ranking - it's not what makes your page rank or don't rank that high" - I am not sure if you are saying it is important or not?
If you look at the URL I sent: http://www.honoluluhi5.com/oahu/honolulu-homes/ - besides the 10 MLS real estate listings on the left side (which all Realtors share), the content lower on the page is all unique - aerial photos, written overview, history of the area and advanced statistical data. My website has only been live for 8 months, has relatively few backlinks (though more than most competitors already, and all natural links - several high quality).
Do we have evidence that Google has tightened the grip and it is tougher for new websites to rank quickly? I am puzzled what may be the reason for the lack of those pages ranking well yet and I think location of the unique content too low on the page may be a main factor. Some insight would be appreciated.
-
Hi,
Although you are right, "real estate" / placement of the content (above the fold, bellow the fold ..) it's important for ranking - it's not what makes your page rank or don't rank that high - for the ones you've sent as examples. The quality of the content (duplicate or unique), competitors, metrics, on-page approach you are taking, keywords targeted, format of serp for some of the keywords there are way more important then placement ....
Thanks.
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
-
Content Strategy/Duplicate Content Issue, rel=canonical question
Hi Mozzers: We have a client who regularly pays to have high-quality content produced for their company blog. When I say 'high quality' I mean 1000 - 2000 word posts written to a technical audience by a lawyer. We recently found out that, prior to the content going on their blog, they're shipping it off to two syndication sites, both of which slap rel=canonical on them. By the time the content makes it to the blog, it has probably appeared in two other places. What are some thoughts about how 'awful' a practice this is? Of course, I'm arguing to them that the ranking of the content on their blog is bound to be suffering and that, at least, they should post to their own site first and, if at all, only post to other sites several weeks out. Does anyone have deeper thinking about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Tabbed Content Revisited
Hi-diddly-ho SEO gurus, quick question. I just saw this article and wanted to get thoughts from the people here. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-says-now-ok-put-content-behind-tabs/178020/ I am constantly at war with our UX guy on this subject because he believes, along with our CEO, that tabbed and accordion style information is better from THE UX standpoint. Less clutter on a page but with information still readily available. I am not here to argue that point but was wondering if you agree with the article posted here. I had to inform them their roll needed to be slowed until I could get something a little more concrete on the matter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spadedesign0 -
Galleries and duplicate content
Hi! I am now studing a website, and I have detected that they are maybe generating duplicate content because of image galleries. When they want to show details of some of their products, they link to a gallery url
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
something like this www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/101 where you can find the logotype, a full image and a small description. There is a next and a prev button over the slider. The next goes to the next picture www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/102 and so on. But the next picture is in a different URL!!!! The problem is that they are generating lots of urls with very thin content inside.
The pictures have very good resolution, and they are perfect for google images searchers, so we don't want to use the noindex tag. I thought that maybe it would be best to work with a single url with the whole gallery inside it (for example, the 6 pictures working with a slideshow in the same url ), but as the pictures are very big, the page weight would be greater than 7 Mb. If we keep the pictures working that way (different urls per picture), we will be generating duplicate content each time they want to create a gallery. What is your recommendation? Thank you!0 -
Removing duplicate content
Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
SEO direction - help needed
Hi, I've been working on a site for about 5 years. We built the traffic up to about 8k visitors/day. Although now it's dropped down over the past 2 years to about 2k visitors a day. New traffic source is mainly from SEO longtail. The whole time we have been working to improve the site. What's the best way to get some help from experts on the right direction to get traffic back up or to at least tell me the site will never work 🙂 Thanks in advance. M
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | relientmark0 -
Content Above The Fold (strategies)
Does anyone know if using a wide responsive layout that brings content well above the fold on big screens (but still pushes it down on small screens or mobile devices) is a good option? We have an adsense site that just got destroyed and I'm assuming its this new Google algo that's looking at sites with too big of ads above the fold.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Penalized for Similar, But Not Duplicate, Content?
I have multiple product landing pages that feature very similar, but not duplicate, content and am wondering if this would affect my rankings in a negative way. The main reason for the similar content is three-fold: Continuity of site structure across different products Similar, or the same, product add-ons or support options (resulting in exactly the same additional tabs of content) The product itself is very similar with 3-4 key differences. Three examples of these similar pages are here - although I do have different meta-data and keyword optimization through the pages. http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099pro.asp http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099proEnt.asp http://www.1099pro.com/prodW2pro.asp
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew2220 -
Is this duplicate content something to be concerned about?
On the 20th February a site I work on took a nose-dive for the main terms I target. Unfortunately I can't provide the url for this site. All links have been developed organically so I have ruled this out as something which could've had an impact. During the past 4 months I've cleaned up all WMT errors and applied appropriate redirects wherever applicable. During this process I noticed that mydomainname.net contained identical content to the main mydomainname.com site. Upon discovering this problem I 301 redirected all .net content to the main .com site. Nothing has changed in terms of rankings since doing this about 3 months ago. I also found paragraphs of duplicate content on other sites (competitors in different countries). Although entire pages haven't been copied there is still enough content to highlight similarities. As this content was written from scratch and Google would've seen this within it's crawl and index process I wanted to get peoples thoughts as to whether this is something I should be concerned about? Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bfrl0