Which page will rank higher, my main article or the sub article linking from it?
-
Hi all,
Can you help me figure this one out?
I'm currently creating content for my website and I very badly want to know which page will rank higher in Google, my main article that has some keywords that are and links to my sub-article, or my sub-article which is optimized for those keywords?
I will demonstrate with an example since I'm not sure my question is clear: If I have an article that talks about different kinds of candy and it links to a sub-article that will elaborate on specific candies like a mint candy ,which page will rank for mint candies.
Until today I believed that if my sub-article which is linked from my main-article will rank for mint candies since it gets the support from my main article.Lately when experimenting this I found my thoughts to be wrong.
Can anyone help me with this one?Any insights?
Thanks,
Leebi
-
Hey Ed,
thanks for clarifying this.
-
It's right what you say but i've seen some evidence that google is going even further now. It's about establishing what are the doorways into your site from the serps. Some people might be looking for just 'candy' and they may see your site in the serps. But probably not since that's supremely competitive.
So the most efficient way I've found is to divide all the content up into 'categories' or topics. So these could be toffees, mints, chews etc. Then you must take a view on what the user wants. Do you think there are people out there who want to see pages about only hard mints with soft mints on another page. Or have both of them on the same page. If you get too granular then you might fall foul of the new maccabees update that penalises for having loads of articles targeting keyword variations.
To give you an example from my business, I have veneers, dental implants, whitening and routine dentistry. Then on each of those pages I have before and afters, prices, procedure, and pretty much everything on there using H2's and schema to pick up specific queries in blue as hyperlinks in the serps.
Comprehensiveness is very important. If I want my pages to rank they must include EVERYTHING users want to know about that thing. So for 'mint candy' i'll want to see hard, soft, sugar free etc etc.
Always be testing. I've had success incorporating reports and videos into the pages too. So you could have a report about how your candy is made or a commercial from a mint candy company or whatever.
But most important is to model the topics of the high performing competitors and be comprehensive and helpful and answer the query. Don't worry too much about internal linking so long as the links are natural, use anchor text and obey your structure and hierarchy of topics.
My home page doesn't rank for anything. But we make millions of pounds a year from our Veneers, Implants and Whitening pages. So maybe you need to focus less on the homepage.
-
Thanks for your time Egol!
-
Google uses a lot of factors to determine which page or pages of a website will rank for a specific keyword. To make a very simple example, which is probably realistic in most situations, we can attribute the ranking of a webpage for Keyword X mainly to two factors: the strength of the page, and the optimization of the page for the specific keyword.
Let's assume that Google uses (strength * optimization).
By that, a weak page with perfect optimization, could be outranked by a strong page with weak optimization. This is probably what you are seeing on your site right now.
Most sites have homepages that are stronger than interior pages, so seeing the homepage outrank an interior page is not uncommon. It is expected to happen a lot. When it happens for you, it means that your interior page doesn't have the strength to compete, and in that situation you should give thanks that your homepage is ranking because otherwise your interior page would be buried.
You should give thanks for another reason. When your interior page gets strong enough to rank on the first page, you will probably have a double listing (two pages on the first page of the SERPs for that query).
If you want to change this outcome, the best work to do is to get more internal and external links into your interior page to improve its strength.
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
-
When using external links for onsite optimization, should they be follow or nofollow links?
I'm trying to optimize my home page and need to add external links. I'm planning to link to other authoritative sites. Should they be follow or no follow links?
On-Page Optimization | | ntaparia171 -
Ranking dropped after change single page url, should I change it back?
I was making updates to the content on the following page, and a few days later dropped from #2 SERP ranking to 50+. Things I checked: Yes, 301 redirect was implemented right away. After publishing, I manually requested indexing in search console. Right after publishing I re-submitted the sitemap manually and Google said they had not crawled it in 9 days. My question: should I change the URL back to the old one, or give it a little more time (especially since I re-submitted sitemap) Original URL: https://www.travelinsurancereview.net/plans/travel-medical/ New URL: https://www.travelinsurancereview.net/plans/travel-medical-insurance/
On-Page Optimization | | DamianTysdal0 -
Will pushing a visitor to a conversion page hosted on a 3rd-party domain hurt the landing page ranking
Had an interesting question from a client. The client has a page that is optimized for a specific term. The goal of the page is to push users to sign-up for a trial. The trial registration (conversion) page is hosted by a third-party. Will pushing users to the conversion page cannibalize the SEO authority of the landing page. My reflexive answer is to say no, but now am not so sure.
On-Page Optimization | | infoblue0 -
Are blog pages hurting rankings?
Let me begin by saying that I have a Wordpress site with a customized theme. When I view my webpage's crawl diagnostics, it keeps showing a lot of Warnings. There are 89 pages with Too Many On-Page Links and 90 Pages with a missing meta-description tag. The problem is that the pages are listed as follows for both errors: Blog Page 10 Blog Page 11 Blog Page 12 Etc. There are no other pages, just the blog pages (which include about 7 posts/page). How do I eliminate the too many links without deleting them from individual blog posts, and how do I add meta-description tags to blog pages without duplicating the tag for /blog? Thanks! | | | | |
On-Page Optimization | | DuBois
| | |
|
|
| | | |
|
| | | | |
| |0 -
Image URL's have knocked my sub-pages down (WP)
I had most of my keywords within the top 10 for this site, some were even ranking in the top 5. For a possible minor boost, more-so to cover all the bases, I decided to add images to all of the pages, and they were uploaded as a gallery with most of the image file names being the same as the keyword. Thus, url's were created with our targeted phrases, extending off of the corresponding sub-page. After that, Google quickly picked up the url's to the images and began indexing them, when that occurred the sub-page which was to be the landing page, quickly tanked. Nothing else on-site changed besides the uploading of the images, so I'm sure they're conflicting and for whatever reason Google can't decide which page to index. The page that contains the images used, or the actual intended landing page. With WP I didn't see a way to not have them link to anything at all, and just be static when using a gallery, stock at least. So, my question is how can I quickly alleviate this problem and what should I do in the future to avoid this? I believe if I change link thumbnails to image file instead of attachment page, that should fix the issue... Then, I'll have dead URL's which I suppose I should 301 to the sub-page. Alternatively, is there a better solution that will work, I was also thinking about no-indexing the attachment URL's, but that doesn't seem to be an option.
On-Page Optimization | | JayAdams320 -
No Content on home page + rankings
If a home page has no content will it hurt the sites ability to rank? The interior pages will have content but not the home page. (See attached image) My client does not want content on the home page as he feels it will take away from the look and feel he wants to achieve. This website is actually 10 sites or locations in one as we intend to market each location (a total of 10) separately. In reality the home page is a doorway page to each separate location. I'd like feedback if possible as to the necessity or not, of content on the Home Page of this or any website. Will the lack of content hurt on the Homer Page hurt with SEO? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | fun52dig
Gary Downey bobby-vans.jpg0 -
Links to Product pages
Hello all, I am still rather new to SEO and learning a lot every day. I do have a question. On our product search result pages (example http://shop.ferguson.com/search/bathroom-lighting)
On-Page Optimization | | Ferguson
It is currently set up so the image, text, price etc of a product is linking to that product page. Our question is, if we were to link the image and the product name - will this be seen as two links to the same page? Is this a bad thing having multiple links to the same page? I searched around to see how other ecommerce sites have similar pages setup and it seems they link the image and also the product name, and the description is not click-able, which allows a user to "Highlight" the text (this is not possible on ours) Which would be to correct approach for SEO as well as User Interface, the way we have it set up, or by going with the method of the question I asked, Thank you for any information on this! Nick0 -
To many links on a single page Error
I've seen it a few times where you should have less then 100 links per page to help crawling unless your a massively authoritative website. But what happens when your a large ecommerce website with categories and sub categories, you could have a category called 'computers' with a drop down list containing lots of sub cat links. Whats the solution to this? Cheers
On-Page Optimization | | activitysuper1