Should I keep writing about the same using rel canonical?
-
Hi,
The service we provide has not so many searches per month. A long tail keyword that describes the service well has at the most 400 searches per month. We wrote a post for this keyword and we ranked number 1 for many months. Now we're on page 2 and I the truth is we stopped writing blog posts because we were raking well for our best keywords. I added a few new posts and lost ranking on my top keywords so I gave up, deleted them and recover the rankings for the keywords I wanted the most. The problem is that I have lost these positions and I know we're supposed to be updating the blog regularly. What would you suggest? Should we keep writing about the same thing and use rel canonical? There aren't that many keywords related to what we offer. I appreciate any ideas.
-
Hi all,
I truly believe that Google has started looking at the traffic on pages of your site, determines what the overall traffic is and then divides that number by number of pages to work out a relevance.
Therefore if have 10 pages getting 50-100 views each (totaling 800 views / 10 pages = 80)
is better than 100 pages getting 20-50 each (totaling 2000 views / 100 pages = 20)
Therefore if you remove your un-intresting pages (least visited) I believe ranking will increase.
What do you think of this theory? (be kind)
Regards
-
Thanks so much Mike! You were a great help.
-
You don't just want to hit a keyword that you think is/will be most important. Organic search terms are all over the place and you can't account for every way in which an organic searcher could possibly find you. But the algorithm, and Rank Brain in particular, takes into account relevancy... how things are related to each other and why that matters. You don't just want someone to find you for [Ski vacations] you want to be an authority on Ski Vacations which includes ski rental tips, what equipment you should have, what clothes always warmth & freedom of movement, popular products, popular locations, and so on.
-
I used to be so motivated asking my coworker to write about our specialty vacation (sport). She writes so well..it's really inspiring and we try not to talk about our services but the experience or what to look for, etc. It's not a boring industry although I'm stuck and don't know what direction to take. I have some keywords that are very related to what we sell and have a good conversion rate. At some point I had written about every possible direct keyword and we started writing about terms that had lots of visits but didn't convert and the worst is that I lost ranking for the keywords I really cared about. I though maybe if these posts got shared and ranked well I could at least link to the posts that actually converted, but I didn't wait long enough and deleted all these posts that weren't directly related to my business.
Let's say we don't have more closely related keywords to write about..would it be a good approach to simply write about tips to play the sport or vacations in general? My fear is to start getting more visits, only a few conversions from those news keywords and losing ranking for my top keywords because Google thinks that my business in not as specific as it used to be.
My competitors have very bad blogs...not updated, not optimized, not shared, liked or anything and they simply talk about the sport in general, they're locations, what to bring on a holidays, etc. They post at the most every 3 months (if they have a blog at all).
I though of creating a subdomain to talk about tips for the sport (videos and articles). This could help others people to improve and some may like it and come on vacation to practice with us.
I know there is a lot of content I can talk about like equipment, the destinations, tips to improve, news, etc..I just don't think they are closely related to my keyword..let's say "ski vacation". I prefer to write about ski vacation in Switzerland, ski vacation for families, winter ski holidays, etc., but there is a limit with these keywords.
Thanks so much Patrick (I liked the post about boring industries and will take a closer look at Moz content stuff) and Mike (I have to come up with interesting things to write about without losing ranking for my top keywords).
-
I know how tedious it can get writing about the same thing over and over again. But it doesn't need to be "We sell product X, product X does this, Look at pictures of Product X" constantly rehashed. Check out related and relevant terms, go find an LSI keyword tool to find things that are related to your business without being the same core term you always use or do some research on competitors around the country to see how they handle this stuff and pull some ideas from them what you could be writing about. Find things in similar and related industries to tie your product and services to... an ice cream shop could write about local beaches; a towing service can write about regular tire maintenance; a moving company can write about history of bubblewrap; and so on.
-
Hi there
"Now we're on page 2 and I the truth is we stopped writing blog posts because we were raking well for our best keywords."
That's your first mistake. Even with a boring business or low search volume industry has content opportunities. There are various ways to spin or repurpose content where it's fresh and new in both the user and search engines eyes. Not to mention, there are news and industry updates that can also help you when the content well has run dry, so to speak.
There are a ton of great content resources from Moz that can help you get the wheels turning when it comes to new content opportunities. I would also focus on the following:
- What are your competitors writing about?
- What are your target audience talking about?
- What type of content are they digesting / sharing?
- What does the future look like for your industry?
- What current trends are happening in your industry that your audience should know about?
Taking yourself through this process will help you better understand opportunities and gaps that you have in your own content, and give you ideas on how you can not only write new content, but continue to do so in the future.
Whatever you do, do NOT write the same thing over and over and slap a canonical tag on it. You're doing good things, just keep pushing and looking for opportunities to tie your long tail keywords into new content by going through the resources / questions above.
Hope this helps - let me know if you have any questions or comments, good luck!
Patrick
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 long does it take for canonical tags to work
How long on average does it take for a canonical tag to work? Understand that canonicals are just a suggestion, but after adding a canonical tag and submitting the page via Google fetch, assuming Google follows the canonical, would you expect it to work after a day or two or does it take longer? We added canonicals to old PPC landing pages that are ranking organically, though our new landing pages (which we want to rank organically) are not identical and have a bit more content/features. They are similar though. Canonicals were added to the old pages (pointing to new pages) and requested indexing via search console. Old pages are still ranking and new pages not so much. FYI we are unable to 301 old PPC pages due to other non negotiable reasons unfortunately. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
My traffic keeps going down...
My website been through many changes the last 5 months. From migrating http to https, server transfer and more. Everything was double checked all the redirects are perfect (301) to the https pages (we have like 28K backlinks so everything needs to be correct), in a matter of fact the migration to ssl made in October and in November the stats went high. The problem is that at the end of November after the server migration the traffic went down and is stably down till today. We re-checked the redirects in every aspect and more in depth and finished fixing issues around end of January. Also before 1 week we stopped the functionality of a parameter (product sort) and removed it from the website entirelly and canonicaled the urls that were using it so if google tries to test those urls with the parameter to see a canonical tag and eventually drop them out of index and stop crawling them. Generally we tried to fix the crawling efficiency and speed. The technical SEO was on fire the last weeks. Still i cant see improvement in rankings, i only see drops. What is the problem here? Where should i look? Any ideas? In webmaster tools we have no 404's and no manual actions. The visibility in Sistrix goes down (check attachment), the ahrefs organic traffic goes down, semrush stats go down... My website is: https://www.pccdkeys.com ecfp87
Technical SEO | | dos06591 -
Incorrect rel canonical , impacts ?
Incorrect use of canonical code.. and why have they used the strange code surrounding it. Hi there seo guys, I need some help.. a site I am working on has used the rel canonical tag incorrectly. they have used the code on the cannon page not on the duplicate pages.. there is also some other strange code with it. I will show and hide the url.. However I wanted to know if this would stop google bots crawling this page correctly as they dont seem to rank very well either.. here is the code:
Technical SEO | | ibusmedia0 -
Rel=Canonical Header Location
Hello, I've been trying to get our rel=canonical issues sorted out. A fellow named Ayaz very kindly pointed out that I'm trying to put the code into the wysisyg editor, but this might not be the best place to put the code. We are using Drupal 6. Where do I insert the code? head> <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/blog/my-awesome-blog-post"> Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OTSEO0 -
How do I properly use the canonical tag to avoid negative effect from having identical content on 2 url’s?
To illustrate… I have same website uploaded at 2 locations (url’s). Only the domain extensions are different. www.myexample.com
Technical SEO | | swiftseo
www.myexample.org The benefit is that I may run some promos on one location and not the other to help in product surveys/testing. The website content is 98% identical and I understand this content duplication may cause SEO problems. The domain I wish to use for rankings etc is www.myexample.com 1) How do I go about avoiding seo problem? Do I need to place the canonical tag at www.myexample.org ie 2) Do I also place the exact same tag at the .com location or not necessary there? Is there an alternative or more effective option to resolving the problem?0 -
Canonical Question
Our site has thousands of items, however using the old "Widgets" analogy we are unsure on how to implement the canonical tag, and if we need to at all. At the moment our main product pages lists all different "widget" products on one page, however the user can visit other sub pages that filter out the different versions of the product. I.e. glass widgets (20 products)
Technical SEO | | Corpsemerch
glass blue widgets (15 products)
glass red widgets (5 products)
etc.... I.e. plastic widgets (70 products)
plastic blue widgets (50 products)
plastic red widgets (20 products)
etc.... As the sub pages are repeating products from the main widgets page we added the canonical tag on the sub pages to refer to the main widget page. The thinking is that Google wont hit us with a penalty for duplicate content. As such the subpages shouldnt rank very well but the main page should gather any link juice from these subpages? Typically once we added the canonical tag it was coming up to the penguin update, lost a 20%-30% of our traffic and its difficult not to think it was the canonical tag dropping our subpages from the serps. Im tempted to remove the tag and return to how the site used to be repeating products on subpages.. not in a seo way but to help visitors drill down to what they want quickly. Any comments would be welcome..0 -
Optimizing a website which uses information from a database
Hi, Sorry if this question is very general. I am in the process of building a website for local business, and it it will be heavily dependent on a database. The database will contain loads of information which can be optimized such as business directory listings, articles, forums, questions and answers etc. The businesses will also be able to link to and from the site. Which is the best way to display this information so that it can be optimized the best? I was going to use drop down boxes on a single page, ie main category, sub catagory, then display the business listings based on this. However, as the information on the page changes constantly based on the drop down the robot / user uses, I am assuming this is very hard to get optimized well. Does anyone know a better way? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | PhatJP0 -
Rel - canonical vs 301 redirect
I have multiple product pages on my site - what is better for rankings in your experiance? If I 301 the pages to 1 correct version of the product page - or if I rel caanonical to the one correct page?
Technical SEO | | DavidS-2820610