Ridding of taxonomies, so that articles enhance related page's value

[utopianwp]

Hello,

I'm developing a website for a law firm, which offers a variety of services.

The site will also feature a blog, which would have similarly-named topics. As is customary, these topics were taxonomies.

But I want the articles to enhance the value of the service pages themselves and because the taxonomy url /category/divorce has no relationship to the actual service page url /practice-areas/divorce, I'm worried that if anything, a redundantly-titled taxonomy url would dilute the value of the service page it's related to.

Sure, I could show some of the related posts on the service page but if I wanted to view more, I'm suddenly bounced over to a taxonomy page which is stealing thunder away from the more important service page.

So I did away with these taxonomies all together, and posts are associatable with pages directly with a custom db table.

And now if I visit the blog page, instead of a list of category terms, it would technically be a list of the service pages and so if a visitor clicks on a topic they are directed to /practice-areas/divorce/resources (the subpages are created dynamically) and the posts are shown there.

I'll have to use custom breadcrumbs to make it all work. Just wondering if you guys had any thoughts on this. Really appreciate any you might have and thanks for reading

[utopianwp]

Thank you for taking the time to respond. Makes a lot of sense, I appreciate it.

[effectdigital]

It is true that having pages with the same "page-name" (the last part following the final slash of a URL, e.g the page-name of this question is "ridding-of-taxonomies-so-that-articles-enhance-related-page-s-value"), which are also topically very similar - can cause 'jumpy' SERPs.

Many feel that the dangers of what is termed 'keyword cannibalisation' are over-egged. This may be true, but I have (myself) assuredly seen examples of it in action. Usually it occurs with most prominence when neither page strongly eclipses the other in terms of SEO authority (e.g: inbound signals like referring domains, citations across the web and general 'buzz' associated with a given URL).

If both pages are new with little authority (or 'popularity') bound to their unique addresses, then certainly Google can get confused. You can end up with problems like, earning a decent ranking for a related keyword - but it hops from page to page every day / week and Google's algorithm bubbles away in the background. This can make it hard to drive traffic to the correct destination.

If both pages are very specific about the keywords which they are targeting, you could turn references of those keywords on the page you don't want to rank - into hyperlinks pointing to the URL which you do want to rank! (sorry that was a bit of a mouthful)

Although TBPR (Tool Bar PageRank) was done away with aeons ago, 'actual' PageRank is still at large within Google's ranking algorithm(s). When one page links to another page with anchor text that matches a keyword, it 'gives away' some of its (ranking) value to the page receiving the link (for the specific keyword or collection of keywords / search entity in question). Think of links as 'votes' from one page to another. The difference between this and real voting is that, for Google not all votes are equal (links from more authoritative pages boost the receiving pages more than links from pages that nobody cares about). Not very progressive but still...

In general we in SEO abused this mechanic between different domains resulting in Google's current clamp-down on EMA (Exact-Match Anchor, in regard to keyword anchor text) linking. That being said: the risk from doing the same thing internally within your own website is extremely minimal, as you are just redistributing SEO authority from one page to another along a specific axiom of relevance.

That's not like when you do it from one domain to another, obviously to leech authority from an external site to your own - which in most occurrences is a violation of Google's Web-Master guidelines.

Do be careful though, don't overdo this. If the content of the page which you don't want to rank ends up stuffed full of hyperlinks, that could make the page look spammy and hurt your CRO (or earn Panda-related algorithmic devaluation).

Just don't go mental, everything should be fine.