Landing pages "dropping" and being replaced with homepage?
-
Hi Moz People
Happy new year to all, I have an interesting one here.
I have recently been making some landing pages and they have all pretty much hit page 1 for the search terms I've focused on (UK Domain).
Up until this morning the landing page was the 8th organic result on the UK domain. However I have checked this morning and the landing page has dropped below the top 50 and instead our homepage is now showing as the last organic result on page 1.
This is intriguing to me as it has also happened to a couple of other landing pages I have made. Is this due to the relevance being driven higher by the landing pages but overall the homepage is more important to Google? Do you guys think this might start happening to the other pages that I have created? Any input would be appreciated!
( Ill give you links and search terms if you want to take a look for yourselves but I try to refrain from "self advertising" )
Happy Thursday Mozzers !
- Jamie
-
Hi Richard
Good shout, after doing some research it looks as though the page that has now been replaced with the homepage actually got 100% CTR for a search term that isn't really relevant to our service. Only 1 click though.
However the relevant searches did get a good few impressions but didn't get a single click. I guess that is going to have something to do with the sudden change.
Seems a bit harsh to take action with only 1 click ...
-
In cases where there are multiple relevant pages, Google can show different ones. Drill down in Webmaster Tools under search queries and click one of the terms. You will see how often each page is shown as well as how often the results were returned in different positions.
-
Hi Amelia
Interestingly the bounce rate for the page that has dropped is lower than the Homepage. Landing page has a 25% bounce rate while the Homepage is 26.46%.
Average time on page is slightly lower than the Homepage. The only issue here is this was a relatively new landing page and there are older ones that are actually ranking higher with much higher bounce and exit rates. In fact one of the pages that has been ranked #3 for the past month has a bounce rate of over 60%!
The only trend I am noticing is the "time on page" being higher on the landing pages that haven't been effected. I guess this is coming down to a user engagement issue as you suggest. I'll try some more provocative wording to see if that helps although now there will be little to no clicks on the effected landing pages as they have dropped so low!
Thank you for your thoughts
**** UPDATE
After doing a little more comparison it appears that the time on page theory has no weight either as the high ranking pages all have pretty low time on page also... back to the think tank lol.
-
Google 'tests' landing pages quite a lot actually. I'd have a poke around in your analytics programme and see what the bounce rate, time on site, pages per visit for each landing page. If the homepage is performing better in these areas than your landing pages then that may be why this is happening. Also look in your webmaster tools at organic CTR - if the homepage has a higher CTR then Google is assuming it's more relevant for the query.
My hunch is that this is the issue - once you've got the comparison data you can look at ways of making your landing pages better for user engagement.
Good luck,
Amelia
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
-
Where the "fudge-nuggets" are my internal links?
Ok, so... Google Webmaster Tools Internal Links are not showing any links to my site's homepage. I only link to the homepage by wrapping the logo with the link throughout the site. Does Google need these to be text links to show them? [/](<a class=)" title="Kona Coffee">![](<a class=)http://1s93mbet6ccj5zkm31703gqj8.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/kona-coffee-1.png" alt="Kona Coffee"/> Site is here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AhlerManagement
http://goo.gl/4C8GKc Could CDN image source be affecting it? Lost... please help!0 -
Keyword Planner - Landing Page Results
When i enter a landing page (a site page) in Google KW Planner Tool it returns an interesting set of results that I would like help with please? The first few results are relevant to that page BUT then it shows KW results that are for any page of my site. The fact that its reporting on the whole of my site rather than just that page - does it matter? ie will google be able to work it out which is the target page vs links to the rest of my site through the site navigation? The site had been live since June 2013 and we struggle to get on Page 1 SERPs, for most of our top themes and i wondered whether this could be a contributing factor? Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
To "Guest Blog" or "Ghost Blog"?
To "Guest Blog" or "Ghost Blog"? I've been wondering which would be better given G's "authorship" tracking program. "Onreact.Com" indirectly raised this issue in a recent blog post "Google Authorship Markup Disadvantages Everybody Ignores" as : "Google might dismiss your guest articles. Your great guest blogging campaign on dozens of other blogs might fail because Google will count the links all as one as the same author has written all the posts and linked to himself. So maybe the links won't count at all." Assuming all other things are equal, would you use "Guest Author" with G Authorship attribution (if allowed) or just ghost the article and include an in-text link without attribution to you as the author?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JustDucky1 -
Content Landing Page
Hey Mozzers, I wanted to get some opinions on here. I'm going to be building out the content on my site a lot of the next couple of months, and have recently started thinking about creating a content landing page. For those not familiar with the concept it's the idea of building this page that basically just pulls together all the content you've written on a specific subject & serves as hopefully a link magnet & destination for people interested in the topic. So my question is this, I am just outlining all of the different posts & areas that I want to cover on specific topics & it is a lot. I'm talking ~20 posts on each subject. Do you think that would be too much content to try & get on one page? Should I break it down to a more finite 5-7 links to high quality articles per page, or create basically this monster guide that links to all these different articles I'll create. Looking forward to getting your opinion, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chris.kent0 -
Landing Page - Home Page redesign SEO factor question - Serious concern.
Hi Folks, I'm considering making a big change to our website and really need some expert advise. Will we lose ranking if we do what I propose? Our site www.meninkilts.com, needs to split users/clients by "Commercial" and "Residential" so we can message/market completely differently to each client. We are considering doing this structure: Landing Page | | Commercial Homepage Residential Homepage Right now we rank well, for our keywords like "Window Cleaning cityname" but are worried that adding a landing page, and splitting our site to two homepages will effect seo (ie: a landing page would only have two buttons: one for commercial and one for residential). What would be the best way to handle this. Looking forward to your insights! Cheers Brent
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MenInKilts0 -
Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors
Hi, I'm new to SeoMoz and to this forum. I've started a new campaign on my site and got back loads of error. Most of them are Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors. I know I have some duplicate titles but I don't have any duplicate content. I'm not a web developer and not so expert but I have the impression that the crawler is following all my internal links (Infact I have also plenty of warnings saying "Too many on-page links". Do you think this is the cause of my errors? Should I implement the nofollow on all internal links? I'm working with Joomla. Thanks a lot for your help Marco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcodublin0 -
Posing QU's on Google Variables "aclk", "gclid" "cd", "/aclk" "/search", "/url" etc
I've been doing a bit of stats research prompted by read the recent ranking blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables There are a few things that have come up in my research that I'd like to clear up. The below analysis has been done on my "conversions". 1/. What does "/aclk" mean in the Referrer URL? I have noticed a strong correlation between this and "gclid" in the landing page variable. Does it mean "ad click" ?? Although they seem to "closely" correlate they don't exactly, so when I have /aclk in the referrer Url MOSTLY I have gclid in the landing page URL. BUT not always, and the same applies vice versa. It's pretty vital that I know what is the best way to monitor adwords PPC, so what is the best variable to go on? - Currently I am using "gclid", but I have about 25% extra referral URL's with /aclk in that dont have "gclid" in - so am I underestimating my number of PPC conversions? 2/. The use of the variable "cd" is great, but it is not always present. I have noticed that 99% of my google "Referrer URL's" either start with:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
/aclk - No cd value
/search - No cd value
/url - Always contains the cd variable. What do I make of this?? Thanks for the help in advance!0 -
How to handle "2" homepages?
Came across an interesting problem. A site has the traditional homepage of site.com and ranks okay. Later I found that another "homepage", site.com/home.html that ranks well for several terms but actually has old branding and semi-up-to-date content. Site.com/home.html has a solid linking profile but not as strong as the current homepage (site.com). The question I have is should I try to salvage the page or 301 redirect to site.com? Thank for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 2comarketing0