Landing page, or redirect? Looking for feedback.
-
If we have a section of our site that we have branded separately from the rest of the site, does it make sense to provide a landing page on our current, high authority site that has content and links off to the separate site, or would just a domain.com/keyword redirect to the page be a better route? Does it matter? I have an idea, but I'd like to get feedback on this.
We are a newspaper, http://billingsgazette.com and we have an auto branded site called http://montanawheelsforyou.com. The URL and branding is fubar. We're wondering if we can increase the ranking if we swapped out the http://billingsgazette.com/autos from a redirect to http://montanawheelsforyou.com to a landing page with content and a link to http://montanawheelsforyou.com.
-
Rachel,
-
All the links going to /autos are telling Google that the page is valuable.
-
Changing /autos to a landing page is then telling search engines that the landing page is valuable but it will require some work to gain some page authority.
-
A link from this page will not bring as much link juice.
However, A link is usually more authoritative than a redirect.
Changing a redirect to a page might lose some juice.
I think the best solution is to create http://billingsgazette.com NEW PAGE NAME and use it as your new landing page, fill it with great content and link it in the menu with the old anchor text "Autos"
From this page, you can add a link to http://billingsgazette.com/autos using some cool anchor text.
I then recommend that you add a link DIRECTLY too http://www.montanawheelsforyou.com/ at the bottom of the page in Sites & partners with the anchor text Montana wheels.
-
-
Just to make sure I understand you, you're saying that if we created a landing page on Billingsgazette.com, which has high authority and is well-established, and put a link out to our newer MontanaWheelsForYou.com website that we are in return sending sweet sweet link juice from our established site to our new site. So, doing this could actually help as opposed to hinder.
Thanks for the feedback - it's 100% the kind I was looking for!
-
Rachael,
Just for clarity (I actually had to draw this out to understand it): Current is BillingsGazette.com/autos 301's to MontanaWheelsForYou.com; correct?
You instead want to create a landing page for BillingsGazette.com/autos that has a link to MontanaWheelsForYou.com in order to increase ranking of MontanaWheelsForYou.com; correct?
If billingsGazette.com/autos Page redirects to MontanaWheelsForYou.com you are passing the link juice to the MontanaWheelsForYou.com page. If you create a new landing page say, billingsgazette.com/autos/landing-page and place a link to MontanaWheelsForYou.com, the new landing page will start with only the one link will not have the value that the older established page had in the beginning. Assuming that billingsgazette.com/autos also links to other pages, etc. the value of the link is: billings .../autos page divided by all the links leaving the page and each receives its share.
To make it easy, the redirect is sending all the value to the MontanaWheelsForYou.com page. So if the page billingsgazette.com/autos has a value of say 50 and you have 10 links, your new page would receive roughly a 5 value. And, if it has more than the link to the one page, the five would be divided again. So, from the landing page with value of 5 if more than the link to MontanaWheelsForYou.com then the value is less than five.
Hope that helps,
Robert
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
-
Leveraging the authority of a blog to boost pages on a root domain.
Hi! Looking for some link building advice. For some background, I work for a company that has over 100 locations across the US. So we are deeply involved with local SEO. We also do a ton of evergreen/ national SEO as well and the spectrums are widely different for the most part. We also have a very successful blog in our industry. It really is an SEO’s dream. I do not even need to worry about a link strategy for this because it just naturally snatches them up. I’m trying to find some unique ways to utilize the blog to boost pages on my main root domain, more specifically, at the local level. It is really hard, besides the standard methods for local link building, to get outside sources to link to our local office pages. These pages are our bread and butter, and the pages we need to be as successful as possible. In every market we are in, we are at a disadvantage because we have one page to establish our local footprint and rank, compared to domains that have their entire site pointed at that local area we are trying to rank in. I’ve tried linking to local office pages from successful blog posts to attempt to pass link juice to the local pages, but I haven’t seen much in terms of moving the needle doing this. Are there any crafty ideas on how I can shuffle some internal linking around to capitalize on the blog’s authority to make my local pages rank higher in their markets? Thank you! -Ben
Local Website Optimization | | Davey_Tree0 -
Looking to create a "best practice" doc on location pages. Anyone know of a useful resource?
I'm working for a few regional brands and would like to create a best practice doc for the structure of a location page. Has anyone seen anything recent regarding a structure for local, regional and national pages? Thanks all, Kevin
Local Website Optimization | | Kevin.Bekker1 -
Home Page Not Ranking for Brand
I've got an odd issue (that I've never encountered in 12+ years in SEO). A client's home page isn't ranking for their brand term. It's a medical spa in Las Vegas, so physical location that takes online appointments. We have an online booking system (which isn't a good one) that originally had a booking page replacing our home page. My thought is that Google associated that page as our home page because it was a stronger domain and the booking page is most used. That tool didn't allow the booking page to be noindexed (I know, crazy)- so I changed the name inside the booking tool away from the brand name as to not have both the site and the booking site optimized for the brand. Other things I've checked: The home page is indexed Home page canonical tag points to itself Title tag contains brand name at front (rest of site it's at the end) Robots.txt is accurate (allows home page) XML sitemap contains home page (and accurate for other pages) To make this even more confusing, if you search the brand name the physical location appears on the right rail with accurate URL. Any other ideas that I may be missing?
Local Website Optimization | | karmadigital0 -
Local SEO: thoughts on driving users to a homepage or to a local landing page?
I work with a client who is about to launch a local landing page for one of their locations. They're worried that the new local landing page will cannibalize some of the keyword rankings for the homepage. Any advice on how to have a local presence but still drive people to the more valuable homepage?
Local Website Optimization | | jrridley0 -
Suburb Pages
Hey Mozers, This is an old and often criticized method of SERP however we have a client who has requested we create suburb specific pages for their site. PLASTIC PLANTS "SUBURB" NEED PLASTIC PLANTS IN "SUBURB" They have shown us a competitor who is ranking for hundreds maybe thousands of suburbs in Australia using this method. Any thoughts or experience in this area would be appreciated.
Local Website Optimization | | wearehappymedia0 -
New Domain Link Building Order - When to 301 Redirect?
Hello Everyone - I am trying to lock down the best Local SEO and link acquisition order for 1 1/2 month old Domain. The Domain is clean - No History - Registered in WMT's on January 20th It's a service franchise website consolidating about 5 independent locations into a single branded site. The each location now has it's own location page on the new site: www.examplesite.com/Location-1 I'm considering the best timing to add 301's to the current Locations individual websites, to the locations pages on the new site.Some of which are currently ranked well (position 2) for one of their primary commercial terms. www.individuallocationsite.com ---> www.examplesite.com/Location-1 I don't want to lose that ranking, but will need to do the 301 redirect at some point. Should I - A.) Complete all of the Citation Work, Natural Profiles, Blog Posts...etc FIRST and let the new website age before 301'ing the locations? Giving it the best chance to have no interruption in those rankings? B:) 301 All the properties into the new website first and start all of the other Local SEO work second? C:) Something else? Thanks in Advance
Local Website Optimization | | CRO_first0 -
Multilocation business, how can you rank for different categories in different locations with only branch pages?
Hello Mozzers, I am wondering how do you rank for categories locally where when you operate from multiple branches. Currently our eCommerce website has location pages for every category but I know that this is now classed as doorway pages and spammy so I am in the process of sorting out our site structure. I understand that the general format for having sites with multiple branches is to have a branch page per physical location and that's about it. Is there any more to this ? However, What confuses me though, is that if you offer all these services in all these branches, how are you going to rank for them locally if you don't have a specific page for each of them in that location? So for example - We rent Carpet cleaners , floor sanders, generators in each of our different branches. My site currently has a carpet cleaner hire <location>url , floor sander hire <location>url and a generator hire <location>url. Every branch has a url for each of my categories.</location></location></location> So if I was to get rid of all of my location category pages. How am I going to rank for these renting these products in different cities where our branches does without having specific location pages for them ? Is it just a case that google knows that because I have branch pages at locations x, y, x , then my carpet cleaner , floor sander and generator category pages will rank locally in those locations providing I have decent citations etc etc etc thanks
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC12
Pete0 -
How to improve optimization of this page
http://www.atomicx.com/cincinnati-web-design.php I am trying to get this page to rank for "cincinnati web design" and related phrases. I redid the landing page with all new content, images, url, etc about 3 months ago. Since then the site is still not showing up in the top 50 results. I see no reason that the page would not be. Our seo and compute repair phrases have all gone up but our web design phrases are being very stubborn. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | Atomicx0