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.
Posts vs Pages and Rankings Differ Greatly
-
I use wordpress for most of my sites and generally have a post 'news' section. What I've noticed is that just about every time a post will always rank much higher and much faster than a 'page'.
As long as I don't let it get buried in the news archives it continues to rank well, better than if I were to create a 'page'.
Is there any sort of reason this might occur? I'd like to be able to just create 'pages' but at this point in time it makes no sense.
-
Lots of my news posts were announcements of a much more detailed article that was posted on a "page" of my site. Because my blog got eight to ten posts per day the post pages would be quickly buried deep in the blog. The article pages were evergreen content. So, I would redirect those posts to the article page. I thought that it helped rankings.
I don't consider it blackhat because the newsy nature of the posts made them of "temporary value". We deleted and redirected thousands of post per year.
-
Right. I was just thinking and I don't know if this is blackhat but because the news posts always rank better than pages, I'm going to test 301 redirecting a news post to a new page and see what happens.
Normally I would just leave it be, but I would like to set up navigational columns within these posts and can not do so because of their structure.
Basically: Make a news post => let it rank for a week => 301 it to its permanent 'page' home.
This is not something I would normally do except for somewhat aged sites where not much new static content is added...
-
Up until about six months ago I had a blog that was focused on news content. The blog got several posts per day of very fresh news. New posts on that blog would be indexed within moments and land on the first page of google - sometimes in difficult SERPs. The rankings would stick for a while - not more than 24 to 48 hours and then quickly slip down the SERPs and disappear.
My guess is that google recognized the "newsy" nature of that blog (lots of queries with "news" as the keyword) and would give that blog short-term good rankings for queries that were getting a surge in volume. Again, that is a guess. But I saw the same treatment that you described.
-
EGOL - Any way to tell google that for the 'pages'.
Or, do they just categorize 'posts' to deserve this and rank higher even if they don't deserve the freshness/news boost? -
This could be cause by "query deserves freshness".
-
Hi guys, thanks for the input.
Sean - The url structure is the same, except for it is in a /news/ folder and I tend to leave the path the same as the page title (for whatever reason that actually helps it even if its long). But not using any time sensitive permalinks on any of the sites.
Sha - I definitely hear what you're saying, when we are the first to post about something it definitely continues to rank highly even after the competition comes in. The thing is, we could put up a 'page' and it wouldn't.
Just seems to make no sense how google treats posts vs pages whether they're in G news or not. I haven't tried it, but I'm pretty sure I could just post a 'post' with no content and it would rank good whereas a 'page' wouldn't get indexed likely.
-
Hi GYMSN,
The most obvious explanation would be the content itself.
If you are following the general idea that pages are for "evergreen" content and posts are for "news", then it follows that the content in your posts tends to be much more topical than that in your pages.
If the content happens to also be timely (appears before others), fresh (up-to-date) and well written/good quality, then it should rank well and may even have a little potential for virality if very topical.
This would easily explain a significant difference in rankings.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
How are your permalinks setup? Posts typically have a dated url structure which could add to their freshness for the site. It is also argued one of the things you should do with post permalinks is move away from that url structure if you want your post urls to rank for a period of time.
Outside of that it really has to do with the site. Are posts given any better visibility from an internal linking standpoint? Are their technical aspects different? title tags, h1 tags etc?
You need to write out every different aspect down and start thinking of what it can be.
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
-
How Are You Handling Blog Posts/Author Pages when Employees Leave the Company?
What do you believe to be the best approach in handling blog content for employees once they have left the company? We don’t want to remove the blog posts so they need to stay, but then there are the author pages. This gets tricky because the CMS ties the blog post to the author. One approach might be to change the author’s name to the Company’s name to get around author pages for people no longer with the company. It’s kind of tricky because the blog posts won’t have the same credibility if they don’t have a person’s name/photo associated with the post. We could leave the blogger’s page and list him as a “Contributing Author” once he’s left the company. Thoughts?
Content Development | | RosemaryB0 -
Wordpress Blog Pages, Duplicate Title Tag
Anyone have any experience in fixing the duplicate Title tag on a Wordpress blog multiple pages Basically the title tag remains the same on the pages /Blog/ /Blog/Page/2/ /Blog/Page/3/ My good friend Yoast Plugin doesn't seem to of resolved this (Unless i have missed something?) I don't really see this to be effecting anything and wouldn't of through it would either, but it would be nice to not see the notification within Moz site crawls and campaigns etc, its more of a cosmetic problem Any solutions ? Thanks James
Content Development | | Antony_Towle0 -
Can I post my MailChimp articles on my blog without getting hit for duplicate content?
I would like to post my newsletters on my blog, but am afraid of duplicate content since you can click a link on the MailChimp email blast to view the Newsletter online. Is this considered dup content?
Content Development | | RoxBrock0 -
Pages and categories with the same name?
I manage a wordpress based site that is needing to under go a site architecture overhaul. the site is christ.org and one of the problems is it has 89 pages but really only 4 are navigatable (not a word apparently). The site also has over 400 posts so categories and parent pages are both definitely needed. One option is I convert a lot of the pages into posts, but would that happen to break any links pointing to those pages turned posts? Or another option is to keep the pages and posts and create a bunch of subpages, then I would most likely end up with similarly named categories and top level pages. I would guess the name of the category needs to be unique from page titles right? And not just unique but very much differentiated than any page title (not posts but page titles). Maybe what I need to do is convert the pages that are not really unique into posts and put them in the category it fits with. And then keep those that are unique as top level pages. The architecture needs some serious work I think 🙂 Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Content Development | | ThridHour0 -
Does every keyword need its own landing page?
So we're doing a bunch of keyword research. We've identified the big traffic, higher competition keywords and we've identified tons (thousands) of long-tail keywords that would be appropriate. What I'm wondering is: does every keyword need its own landing page (or content page)? Obviously, we'll be building content for all the primary keywords we're targeting. I'm less mystified about that. What I'm more confused about is what to do about the long tail keywords. For there to be any measurable traffic increase, we need to rank well for thousands of long tail keywords. But it's just not realistic to create thousands of quality content pieces to target each of these long tail keywords individually. So how do you go about ranking for large numbers of long tail keywords? I saw somebody post about using an FAQ page to target multiple long tail keywords which makes sense but even with that I'm not going to have a thousand questions. How does one go after large volumes of long tail keywords? Thanks, --eric
Content Development | | EricOliver0 -
What is a Hub Page?
Can anybody explain what is a hub page? Do you have any example? In a other post, somebody suggest creating hub pages. This is the post: http://www.seomoz.org/q/online-store-with-4-products-available-in-50-sizes-need-tips-categories-products Thank you, BigBlaze
Content Development | | BigBlaze2050 -
Should I publish several blog posts at once or stagger?
I have several blog posts that I want to publish (40 or so). For freshness is it better to stagger their publication over several months or is it fine to publish them all at the same time. The comments are closed.
Content Development | | AndreB0 -
Index.html vs. default.html
Hi, I have a website that is about 7 years old. I had been using index.html as the home page. When I redesigned my site about 3 months ago I changed it to default.html. The old index.html page was still on my server. I just realized my mistake. All of my links to the home page lead to the new default.html. However, people are still landing on the old index.html. I have change the old index.html to the new design but that means i have 2 "home" pages out there. Should i delete one? Should I leave them both there but use the canonical tag for one so it is not considered duplicate content? What is best for my rankings?
Content Development | | bhsiao0