Home Page & Most Important Category Page Cannibalizing Each Other
-
OK, so here goes. We have an odd situation on our hands. Our website sells a product technically known as "nail polish strips". We are a small player at the moment, but the reviews we've gotten in "side-by-side" comparisons vs. the big boys have been crazy, and literally always in our favor.
Now the issue.....
The best way to describe our product as mentioned above is they are Nail Polish Strips. Our domain name includes the term "Nail Strips" in it. Of the 200+ bloggers that have done reviews and provided us links, about 80% or so have linked to the home page, most just using our websites name, some have been nice enough to actually use keyword terms like nail polish strips.
Moral of the story, for the term nail polish strips, our link profile would indicate to the google machine that our home page is stronger for this term.
THE BIG ISSUE HOWEVER......
Our main category on the site that shows products is the page we originally intended to optimize for the term Nail Polish Strips. And our aim was going to be to optimize our home page for something else, like maybe plain old Nail Strips.
THE BIGGER ISSUE......
At any given moment, Google is having a hard time figuring it out. Based on our link profile, we should be on page one, but what we're seeing is today, it's our Nail Polish Strips category page that ranks for that term, and tomorrow that listing will be replaced with our home page. Literally, last night the home page was on the top of page two, and today, the category page is on the middle of page two. They keep flip flopping. Sometimes they both appear within the first 3 pages, sometimes only one appears on page two, the other drops out of the top 10 pages.
OUR THINKING IS.......
Our home page obviously has more strength and if the google machine is even implying they like it for that term, we might as well accommodate that. Keyword spy shows this term has a volume of around 18,000 searches. The term isn't hugely competitive, so we planned to 301-redirect the current category page URL that is competing with the home page, to the home page, and re-create and optimize the category page for something different, like Nail Polish Stickers or something to that effect.
THE FINAL ISSUE.......
The term stickers in this industry as it relates to our product has been the victim of a negative PR campaign because the big boys (or girls) are trying to say "Nail Stickers" are garbage as opposed to "Nail Polish Strips". The problem is Nail Stickers gets a lot more traffic. So we figured, we'd optimize the category page for Nail Polish Stickers, and explain in the text, that despite what some of our competitors say, just because we're using the word "stickers" to describe them, doesn't mean they are bad, so on and so forth. I ONLY MENTION THIS SO YOU SEE WHY I'M HESITANT TO PULL THE TRIGGER ON OUR ABOVE FIX.
I know this is long, and I'm not doing a great job of putting it in to words, but any insight will help. I'm supposed to pull the trigger today or tomorrow on this re-direct and new strategy, but don't want to do so until I get some of my fellow ninja's opinions.
-
I think you are missing my point. The Nail Stickers page does not need to be a list of links to products like your other page as that is not the product you are providing.
Make it a page that talks about the differences. You can make it unique. Start a campaign about "Friends Don't Let Friends Wear Nail Stickers". Make it funny even. Why not show pictures of bad "Nail Stickers" and have users submit. Think about it and you will be able to setup a separate but complementary page that is different. Beat your competitors at their own game.
-
Problem being, the nail polish strips and stickers are the same product. It's just that Nail Stickers gets a boat load more traffic than Nail Polish Strips. In the public's eye, they don't really know the difference, but those that do would be alienated because they have a bad association with stickers. It's a conundrum that we're in.
We didn't want to have a whole 2nd page that listed the same exact products, just optimized for a different keyword. Post-Panda that's a bad practice.
But honestly, our competitors that are bashing stickers are just trying to make sure people don't mix up this new type of product with the old more inferior stickers.
-
My gut agrees with you to 301 the Nail Polish Strips category page to the home page. If you could not do that, say you needed the category page for site navigation, then use the canonical link (Google thinks of it as a 301). The 301 would be more solid - also on the home page setup a canonical to self link.
On the other keyword, just setup another page and optimize for that keyword separately. Talk em up! If anything you do a whole post on why you think stickers sucks and so they should look at your ... wait for it .... Nail Polish Strips! I think you can turn that negative into a huge positive and the optimization can be setup separately for those keywords etc. Your sticker page will be on a different URL and with optimization on a different term so it should not be a problem.
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
-
My competitors all seem to use "junk" pages to rank / backlink, how to compete and not cheat
Hello, Page 1 of Google for the word "copier lease" and most other valuable copier leasing terms are dominated by the same 4-5 for organic (PPC too of course, but organic is what I want) They all use some SEO company, so when I go and look for good link oppertunities, most of the pages I find are just SEO companies who of couse would never be interested in a competitor's link. Examples: ajaxunion blogspot com or excellentpoly blogspot com and the list goes on, all just AjaxUnion "blog pages". blog homerenovationguide com /2011/06/15/repair-or-replace is just inhouse SEO making ranking pages for CostOwl. So, its hard NOT to want to throw up a blog farm and do as "the Romans do". What ideas do you all have to get backlinks in this market of Copier Leasing that would hold up. Thanks 6SW66.png 6SW66.png
Link Building | | einstein99992 -
Can I Boost Ranking Linking off Pages internallly?
My domain authority is relatively low, but my right now my homepage seems to have the highest rank. If I place a few internal page links on my homepage, would this boost ranking on internal pages? Or would it pull juice away from my homepage? Using the Seomoz OSE I see alot of my competitors using this type of strategy linking internally. Also would using breadcrumb links benefit me in anyway? Thanks very much!
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
Penguin: Carry On & Hope Or Start A New Site
I'm at a loss and no so-called SEO agency/expert I've hired appears to know the main causes of our post-Penguin downfall of our traffic. To set the scene, I set up a voucher code site (www.ozvouchercodes.com.au) in Australia 3 years ago and since, it's been growing very well up until Google launched the Penguin update in April. Having read as much as I could on the update my understanding is toxic links cause the slap. For on-site I've checked the site and tried to reduce keywords [spamming], increased [unique] content across the site and made sure there are as few instances of duplicate content as possible. To attempt to understand my back link profile I've used SEOmoz & Link Detective as the current SEO agency give me little visibility on this. It appears we're a little top heavy with 32% & 11% of are keywords containing 'coupons' and 'promotion codes' respectively. Consequently we no longer appear on those two terms but also hundreds of other terms we once appeared in the top 3 postitions. The Link Detective report downloaded also appears to have a number of back links with the words 'Penalized' and 'Banned' next to them. Unfortunately there is no explanation on Link Detective whether this needs action or not. My current SEO agency suggest that we have been too focused on a limited number of keywords and that a few more months of diversifying the range will solve it. So do I spend another £X amount for 3-6 months of SEO or drop the site on a new URL and start again. Any ideas? Any help is very welcome & appreciated. Henry
Link Building | | henryboyson1231 -
Guest Blog Etiquette & Re-using "Expired" Content
Hi everyone, There's two parts to this Q, which is why the title's sort of split in half. We wrote a guest blog post that we were really proud of, which took a good few hours of work. It went live about a month ago, but I just happened to notice recently that it had disappeared off the person's website - I now get a 404 error and I can't find it either using a 'site:' search in Google or via the site's own search tool. I've tried getting in touch with the webmaster, but he's no longer responding to my emails. I really don't know if a) it disappeared by accident (for whatever reason), or b) they purposefully wanted to remove it and now they're avoiding me. My two Q's: Do you think it's cheeky to re-use the content, by giving it to someone else? Or would you say it goes against guest blogging etiquette? It seems a shame to waste it, for it to disappear. If I were to re-use it, would there be any implications regarding Panda, given the fact that it was content that was once live (i.e. effectively 'duplicate', once upon a time), even if the 'original' content is no longer indexed by Google? Would it even be considered a duplicate if published again now? Many thanks in advance!
Link Building | | Gmorgan0 -
Merging 10 niche pages into 1 large page: how to go about it?
Good day,
Link Building | | rayvensoft
I am new to SEOmoz, so please allow me to take this opportunity to introduce myself before jumping into the questions. I have a small network of sites that focus on language education online. I have been working on them for about 3 years, and they were starting to do well. I am sure I made some mistakes along the way with regards to SEO (I paid for article distribution, and directory submission). I also did link exchanges - mainly with related sites, but some of them were kind of grey . I stayed away from blackhat entirely.
So, like many people I got affected by Google Penguin. Luckily it was not as bad as many of the people I have heard about. 7 out of my 10 sites, stayed on or near the top for the main keywords. They did however drop for some of the secondary keywords. 3 of the sites however got hit hard. Based on this, I have ventured to guess that google is telling me I was doing it about 70% right, and 30% wrong. Well, live and learn.
After April 24th I started to scower the web to find out what happened and to see what to do. In my readings I noticed that a lot of people were affected, but some where not. The one thing I found that most of the people who were affected had in commune was that they were on SEOmoz. So I decided to join. So now I am here to hopefully learn what I did wrong, and what I need to do right. I have no problem at all in starting from scratch and putting in the hard work. Now, as for my question. As I mentioned, not all of my sites were hit by Penguin. More of them survived than got killed. I was hoping to be able to leverage those sites to give the new larger site a kick-start. Just to give you some metric, all 10 sites have a quality rank of between 40-60 according opensiteexplorer. The linking is nothing extreme. The pages have anywhere from 200-1000 links. Nothing more than that. So here are the questions. 1) The SEO I did on all 10 sites were very similar. So I am afraid of just doing a 301 redirect from the 7 other sites in the future google may punish them as well, and as such my main page new page will suffer. What would you guys recommend. Instead of a 301, I could just ad a link to the sub pages on the new site. It would be less effective, but also less risky. What would you all suggest? 2) If I take the 301 option, what is the general recommendation on how to phase it in. I am assuming Google would not like it if all 7 pages got redirected on the same day. That would essentially make the page have 5000 or so links overnight. What is the general recommendation for these kinds of things. one 301 a week? one 301 a month? The 301's would not be to the homepage, they would each go to a relevant sub-section of the site. Sorry for the long first post. My wife tells me I don't know when enough is enough sometimes. 🙂 Thanks in advance for any assistance and I am excited to see what I can learn on SEOmoz.0 -
How important are directory submissions to my off-page SEO?
Hi Guys, One area of my link building that I carry out is looking for online directories and social bookmarking websites to submit my website to. I do this in order to gain some backlinks to my website. What I want to know is are they really worth my time, and if so, which types would you say are the most important? I have obviously been through many directory lists, both on SEOmoz and on other websites, and also performed various searches to find relevant directories to my website. I just feel that posting up a link that lies deep in a directory online that, more often than not, have very low PA and lots of outbound links will offer very little in terms of SEO. If anything, this could really bring down the quality of my links and be detrimental to my website, right? This is a subject that I have been thinking about for a while and especially with the recent algorithm update from Google and the attack on many web directories that are, lets say, 'not playing by the rules', I'm worried that this will have a negative impact for my website. Let me know your thoughts guys and if you have any tips on how to get higher quality links from these kind of submission then I'm all ears! Matt.
Link Building | | MatthewBarby0 -
What % Page Metrics & Social, What % Links?
It seems that a lot of the focus of SEOs, especially whitehat SEOs like SEOMoz and Distilled has shifted a lot more towards improving page metrics (bounce, return rate, etc) and social metrics. I'm curious - And of course, I'm just asking for guesses - But what percent of ranking do you think is page metrics, social metrics and other non-link based metrics and what percent do you think are link based metrics?
Link Building | | DerekP0 -
Online Journal (Magazine) -- Past Issues pages
We're hoping to restructure the Past Issues pages for the online version of our twice-monthly medical journal. Right now the Current Issue page (sort of a truncated table of contents) gets replaced twice each month, when a new issue is available. The current location of for our past issues page is shown below: Home Page > News & Journals > Journals > American Family Physician > Past Issues Under Past Issues, there is a page for each year. 2011 - 2010 - 2009 - etc (back to 1998). Is there an advantage to putting all of the Past Issues on a single page? This would be 24 issues per year, which is just over 250 links on a single page and it would grow by 24 each year. I'll attach a couple of screen shots of ideas I'm considering. One is an expandable navigation using jQuery for each year, listing all Past Issues on a single page. The other is making the links to the 3 most recent issues available in the left nav across all Past Issues pages. Do you have other suggestions for how we might structure this? cydxG.png PDXT9.png
Link Building | | aafpitadmin0