Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Need advice: How to replace a high-ranking pdf with a landing page -- without dropping much in rank?
-
Hi! We have a pdf of a white paper on our site that ranks #1 for a niche term. We are now exploring the idea of building a landing page for this paper with an overview (2-3 paragraphs) and a registration form for interested parties to fill out in order to access the paper.
Do you think there'd be any hope of ensuring the new landing page would rank almost as well eventually (top 3)? I'm thinking a key consideration would be preserving the link juice from the existing links that are coming into the pdf, and that 301 redirecting the pdf URL to the new landing page URL could help with that. Am I right? Or would it be better to try to reach out to the linking sites and ask them to update their links (seems daunting).
Any advice/opinions on this situation would be appreciated. (If folks think that there would be a significant risk of permanently dropping out of the top 5 by attempting this, we would likely choose to leave the pdf ungated as is.) Thanks!!
-John
-
Thanks Chris, Bernadette and Donna for your thoughtful answers. After considering your advice (and the resources you shared), I think it's worth a try. If nothing else, it will be a good experiment (and fairly low risk -- even though the pdf ranks #1, it's not a high-volume term). I think it will be important for the landing page to provide a really meaty, useful synopsis (as Chris suggested) that still offers some value on its own. Thanks again!
-John
-
John,
Not long ago, you should have fully expected to lose up to 15% of a page's SEO equity with a 301 redirect. That changed in February of this year when Google's John Mueller announced that no page rank is lost with 301 or 302 redirects.
Moz's own Cyrus Shepard wrote a What You Need To Know Post after that announcement. I think if you read it, you'll be well equipped to weigh your options and decide on the best path forward for this particular situation.
-
John, that's a good question. Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword, I would hesitate to set up a 301 redirect--you still may see ranking changes if you replaced it with a landing page.
I suspect that the reason why it's ranking is because other sites are linking directly to the PDF file, the content. If you were to remove that PDF, they might stop linking to it.
One option would be to edit the PDF file and make that PDF the landing page (in .pdf format), that would be the same URL.
-
Hello John, interesting dilemma you have. I think you have a good idea as well. I would be interested to learn about the level of competition for this term, I imagine it can not be that intensive if your PDF is ranking #1.
My recommendation would be to build the landing page, but include some of the content from your PDF as a preview. You can then offer the free download sign up to continue reading. It's likely the PDF is ranking well because of the content.
Of course you will want to create a 301 redirect to the new landing page from the old PDF URL. Also, keep the same title tag or anchor text that people are using to link to the PDF or the title that Google is currently giving the PDF. I think you have a good chance of retaining the #1 ranking if done right.
You may also have meta information within your PDF that you will want to migrate to the landing page. We're a big fan of landing pages at AdFicient and this sounds like a promising opportunity. Best of luck.
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 to buy high quality backlinks in 2018?
I am searching for backlink vendors, only english-speaking websites, financial topic. Another option is business, news, technologies, cryptocurrencies related sites. Only high-quality, active and developed websites, real traffic, no spam. If you have some contacts of vendors of such kind (or if you have access to the right website), please share emails - would really appreciate that!
Link Building | | g01110 -
DMOZ Directory Impact on Rankings
For about 5-10 years ago many SEOers said that it is in particular important to be in Dmoz. What about nowadays?
Link Building | | kitoks
Moreover is it still working and accepting new projects. I suggested several of my projects but no news from them0 -
Do links to my website improve all pages?
I'm currently building links to my home page (through directories) and blog pages. However, none of these pages are actually targeted pages for main keywords. In SEO, do links to any webpage of a site contribute to the improved rank of other pages?
Link Building | | Gavo0 -
Do you need a place to ditch bad links?
This is not a question as such, more a gift 🙂 I have registered a domain name to ditch bad links. For example, let's pretend I have a page on my site: www.mydomain.com/viagra and have never done any good SEO to promote this page, just a load of spammy directory links. The page used to rank for Viagra but then Google took manual action and I lost my ranking. Booo! Now the page is of no use to me until I get all these links removed and the manual action revoked. Even then, I'll be starting from scratch re-building good links to the page. Here's another option, simply re-direct the url to badlinksbin.com and say goodbye to all those spammy links. This bypasses the lengthy link removal process. Warning: I wouldn't recommend using this method if you have some good links in the mix, unless you can contact the site owners and get the links changed. And, don't forget to change the name of the url first so the Viagra page still exists on your site. As I've already set this up, I thought no harm sharing it and letting you guys use it too. I hope it helps some people.
Link Building | | Matt_Wilson0 -
A few questions I need help with and would appreciate any help.
I am currently building links to our website via estalished blogs ect (2+ years old), As far as I understand even if they are unrelated to what we do (print) as long as the post is about print the link should offer some value is this correct? Other questions I have which I would greatly appreciate advice in are as follows........ (1) Do charity websites or company websites with link pages ( about5-10 other links) or links / logo's on the front page offer value even on unrelated sites? (2) What happens if 80% of the link building I am doing comes from blogs? (3) If I have links that are clearly spam that have been built to our site can they be damaging our potential to rank and how can I remove them as I have tried to contact the relevant parties but fear pressing the button on the google tool may harm our site should I? (4) If I have a page that genuinely has a lot of mentions of a keyword (not so much the money keyword but part such as wanting to rank for pool table but end up with the different versions of keywords having table mentioned 5 - 10% of the time). Thank you for your time.
Link Building | | BobAnderson0 -
Why is my homepage ranking BELOW a subpage?
Search "peer to peer lending". The page http://www.ratesetter.com/peer_to_peer_lending.htm appears higher than the homepage. I don't think this is because of keyword density on page either as Zopa (competitor) have zero mentions of this keyword on their homepage. What are your suggestions for getting the homepage ranked higher? Thanks, Simon.
Link Building | | RateSetter0 -
Should I 301 Redirect The index.html Page?
Hello, As an experiment I am trying to work with an SBI site but am noticing index.html is being forced on me as the homepage. As I understand it's good practice to 301 redirect the index.html page to the to the actual home page. Can someone please confirm that I am right in thinking this? Here is an example: http://www.anguilla-beaches.com/index.html
Link Building | | umtmedia
http://www.anguilla-beaches.com/ According to yahoo 773 links are pointing to the index.html page and 771 links are pointing to the / page. I'm sure Google knows that these are the same pages and does not consider them as duplicate but surely the index.html page should be redirected right? am I going mad here? Now if we look at this site: http://www.jugglenow.com the homepage has 198 links according to yahoo
http://www.jugglenow.com/index.html this page also has 198 links? now I am confused, are these 2 the same page? On this page: http://www.jugglenow.com/juggling-balls.html notice how there is no link to the actual homepage but there is a link to the index.html page. Am I missing something here because I can't figure it out, surely there should be just 1 homepage without a index.html page. Any help would be appreciated0 -
Need ideas to get do follow links from highly competative niche "wedding"
I need to get high quality do-follow links and my target market/keyword is ‘Maui wedding’ and a few others. Because it is such a competitive market I am having a hard time getting links from local companies providing Maui Weddings (I know why because they are my competitors) and national companies sites aren't much help because they are trying to provide leads to their advertisers. I would like do-follow links from non-paid sources any ideas or resources you could help with would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Link Building | | photoseo10