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 rankings dropped from 2 page to 8th page and no penalization?
Dear Sirs, a client of mine for more than 7 years used to have his home page (www.egrecia.es) between 1st and 2nd page in the Google Serps and suddenly went down to 8 page. The keyword in question is "Viajes a Grecia". It has a good link profile as we have built links in good newspapers from Spain, and according to Moz it has a 99% on-page optimization for that keyword, why why why ??? What could I do to solve this? PD: It has more than 20 other keywords in 1st position, so why this one went so far down? Thank you in advance !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tintanus0 -
How do we decide which pages to index/de-index? Help for a 250k page site
At Siftery (siftery.com) we have about 250k pages, most of them reflected in our sitemap. Though after submitting a sitemap we started seeing an increase in the number of pages Google indexed, in the past few weeks progress has slowed to a crawl at about 80k pages, and in fact has been coming down very marginally. Due to the nature of the site, a lot of the pages on the site likely look very similar to search engines. We've also broken down our sitemap into an index, so we know that most of the indexation problems are coming from a particular type of page (company profiles). Given these facts below, what do you recommend we do? Should we de-index all of the pages that are not being picked up by the Google index (and are therefore likely seen as low quality)? There seems to be a school of thought that de-indexing "thin" pages improves the ranking potential of the indexed pages. We have plans for enriching and differentiating the pages that are being picked up as thin (Moz itself picks them up as 'duplicate' pages even though they're not. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggiaco-siftery0 -
Sitemaps and dynamic pages
Hi all, I have a gigantic website and they are adding another subdirectory to it. My question is regarding html sitemaps for better optimisation. 1. Should a keyword focussed front end (html) sitemap be made for all the dynamic URLs or 2. Should a category focussed front end (html) sitemap be made for all the dynamic URLs what would be your approach to doing a sitemap with thousands of pages with a structure like Directory > Sub directory > Subdirectory > Files
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
What to do with Authoritative footer pages?
Alo everyone! The site I'm working on has had a homepage that essentially used the footer as the main form of navigation on the site and the PA of each of those pages reflects that. I'm helping them re-organize the site (I'm still a noob though), and was curious for some input on this particular situation. Some of the most authoritative pages are: 1. www.charged.fm/privacy - PA 29 2. www.charged.fm/terms - PA 29 My question: Is this just a consequence of previous mistakes that we live with, or is there something involving 301's and creation of new pages that could help us utilize the link juice on these pages. Or should we come up with ways to internally link to 'money' pages from these pages instead? Thanks for any input, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | keL.A.xT.o0 -
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 -
Category Pages up - Product Pages down... what would help?
Hi I mentioned yesterday how one of our sites was losing rank on product pages. What steps do you take to improve the SERPS of product pages, in this case home/category/product is the tree. There isn't really any internal linking, except one link from the category page to each product, would setting up a host of internal links perhaps "similar products" linking them together be a place to start? How can I improve my ranking of these more deeply internal pages? Not just internal links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
How long for new pages to rank
Hi Guys, Our website has some really good serps for our established keyword phrases some of which are quite competitive. We recently acquired and have begun selling some new brands through our online shop and launched new pages for these brands around 2 months ago. They are quite competitive ("merrell shoes" and "timberland boots" for example in google.co.uk) terms. Do you think we should get some keyword rich links built into these new pages from external sites such as blogs - or is there chances of ranking well driven more off our overall site authority/link profile? In other peoples experience, what is a typical realistic timeframe to start getting meaningful serps on new pages/keyword phrases (I know that is hard to answer - but ball parks figures appreciated). Thank you everyone in advance. Kind Regards (and happy thanksgiving to our US friends)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ConradC
Conrad Cranfield0 -
How to find what Googlebot actually sees on a page?
1. When I disable java-script in Firefox and load our home page, it is missing entire middle section. 2. Also, the global nav dropdown menu does not display at all. (with java-script disabled) I believe this is not good. 3. But when type in <website name="">in Google search and click on the cached version of home page > and then click on text only version, It displays the Global nav links fine.</website> 4. When I switch the user agent to Googlebot(using Firefox plugin "User Agent Swticher)), the home page and global nav displays fine. Should I be worried about#1 and #2 then? How to find what Googlebot actually sees on a page? (I have tried "Fetch as Googlebot" from GWT. It displays source code.) Thanks for the help! Supriya.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amjath0