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
-
Links to "boring" pages
Hello Mozzers, EDIT: Is internal linking enough? This question is my head for a long time. Let's say I have a webdesign company and a website (really?). I have a blog and write quality content on a weekly basis. The content is great and people love it, they share it on social networks and other webmasters link to these articles. Now I have one optimized page, that brings me the business. Lets say: mywebsite.com/webdesign-service On this page I only have boring stuff like saying what I am offering and testimonials and stuff. So basically a page no one shares and no one links to. But it's important to rank with the keywords targeted on this site. How do I get to rank this page? A page that doesn't offer value to anybody. Normally, we shouldn't have pages like this, but some companies do boring stuff and creativity doesn't help. Maybe this question is stupid, forgive me but I don't get it. I am thankful for any answers on this!
Link Building | | grobro0 -
Ranking a specific inner page for a specific website
Hi, I'm new here and it's my first question. I'm not so new in SEO, the thing that I know now is google has changed its game plan. lol. My question is: I have a specific website (aged website but not well-optimized overall), and I want the inner page (with good on page optimization for a certain kw) to rank for the main kw that it's optimized for. How to do this these days? Should we build more kw to this page like usual? If yes, then what best practices to do it? thx guys
Link Building | | martino8880 -
Is my linking tactic affecting my rankings?
Hello All, I'd like to think that my SEO style was both helpful and useful. But lately i've been thinking that I may be damaging my own SEO! Let me explain, I love forums and technical gossip. Being a IT guy, I usually find an interesting question from websites like Yahoo, Microsoft, SOASE Forums etc etc and write a decent article on one of the questions going into real detail. I then post my basic answer (word limits) and a hyperlink incase anybody wants to read the rest of my article. I used to think that this was great for SEO, because it was certainly great for making great connections. However, a backlink check on my website shows that I have a good 40 - 60 hyperlinks, 40/ 50 of which from just Forums I've posted on but only from 3 - 4 domains. Would this affect my ratings? Looking at my own site from an SEO consultant perspective, having one source of links seems awfully suspicious to me!
Link Building | | Paul_Tovey0 -
Classified Sites Ranking on Page 1
How is it that Craigslist, and Backpage get a boost from google and take over 1 or more of the page one results in my niche? Ive also seen people ask a yahoo question, and answer with a link to their website? Are these just temporary boosts?
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
Massive drop off in my google rank. Why?
Hi recently I've noticed a steep drop in my google ranks for a couple of my sites. I was at 2 then I fell to so that I'm not even in the top 50. Can anyone help explain the massive decrease?
Link Building | | FPK0 -
External Anchor text page to target?
I have onpage optimised 4 pages on my website example.com/services/chosenkeyword-1 example.com/services/chosenkeyword-2 example.com/services/chosenkeyword-3 example.com/services/chosenkeyword-4 Should I built links with various anchor text to my home page or the exact internal page as above? Cheers.
Link Building | | Socialdude0 -
PPC Landing pages and SEO landing pages query
We do a fair amount of work on PPC and because of this a lot of our PPC landing pages also do quite well in SEO. We are thinking that the landing pages do well because they get a lot of traffic from PPC and therefore, maybe google can index and take note of these pages quicker? The pages that usually shoot right up the rankings are new pages used for long tailed keywords. So I have a few questions: Does the traffic from PPC actually have any effect on SEO rankings? If we were to create a page that was to act solely as an SEO landing page, would google take note if there was no traffic? Would simply linking from our main site to the landing page be enough to give it a bit of authority, in which we can build upon? Thanks in advance.
Link Building | | esendex0 -
Site size affecting page rank?
I've noticed the sites that rank above me for certain phrases are much larger than I am. Here are the results of the 'site:' command for the top 6 results for a phrase I want to rank for (yes, I know that 'site' is not exact): 32,600 pages 8,760,000 pages (wikipedia) 684 pages 148 pages (domain name equal to search phrase) 1400 pages 120 pages (my site) Now, I appreciate that larger sites have more stuff to link to, and therefore have more juice flowing to them from external links. BUT, is it also true that they are generating lots of internal juice by having so many pages? I've looked at the PageRank algorithm and understand that the max page rank for a site (with no external links) is based on the number of pages of that site and how well linked they are). My question is: based on all the experts here, is number of pages in the site an important factor (assuming good on-page SEO), or does it really come down to number of external links (from relevant sites with appropriate anchor text, of course)? Can a small site with tons of external links rank above much larger sites? Has anyone beaten Wikipedia for a phrase they were targeting? How did you do it? Thanks!
Link Building | | scanlin0