On a well planned website you are targeting different keywords for every page. Sometimes those keywords end up overlapping and you get more than one page optimized for a certain keyword. This often happens when you sell something that also requires replacement parts or supplies. All of those pages would likely have the name of the main product in the url, title, headers, etc. This creates a situation in which those pages end up fighting over some of the same keywords. So how do you deal with this situation? I have been building a lot of links to the main product pages in hopes of pushing them above the parts & supplies pages. Unfortunately I've still got some of those supplies pages dragging down my rankings. Instead of sitting in the middle of page 1, my rankings are down on the 3rd or 4th page as Google is choosing to rank a page with no external backlinks. Do you think it would help to set the main product pages as higher priority in my xml sitemap? Unfortunately it seems like my only other option is to de-optimize those supplies pages by taking some of those keywords out of the urls, titles and headers. Hopefully someone here has dealt with this situation before. Thanks!
I don't consider it cannabalization at all. I WANT this type of situation. It can help you a LOT in ranking if implemented correctly. When I build sites I typically build them based on the theme pyramid concept that Brett Tabke talked about on WebmasterWorld.com back in 2001. You'll have to scroll down about a third of the way... When you starting seeing red/blue diagrams, you're there. So much he wrote about then still holds true... ESPECIALLY at Google where relevance of pages linking to you is so important. People are always talking about how to interlink pages on your site to optimize the "flow of PR". Have you every thought about how to optimize the "flow of relevancy" around your site? It is something TOTALLY different but IMO this is equally if not more important than the flow of PR and should be considered when you are coming up with your site's information architecture - site structure, navigation, interlinking of page, naming of pages, keyword rich URLs, etc. Once you understand how they work, you can see that Theme Pyramids optimize both the flow of page rank AND the flow of relevancy throughout your site. The concept is basically that you compartmentalize your site into several major sections each about a different topic. You create pyramids or silos or verticals for each of the topics. These verticals are typically what you would see on the main navigation of the site (excluding About Us, Contact Us, etc. which I don't think belong on a main nav anyway). So if say I had a site that did online lending, at the highest level I might compartmentalize the site into product pages for the different loan types... creating my high level pyramids something like www.example.com/mortgage/ www.example.com/refinance/ www.example.com/home-equity/ www.example.com/auto/ Each of the above would target the broadest terms specific to that loan type. For instance, the <title> of my mortgage product page might be <title>Mortgage - Mortgage Loan - Mortgage Loans</title>. Then within each loan type I may have an articles section, news section, and a calculator section... so I end up with something like: www.example.com/mortgage/news/ www.example.com/mortgage/articles/ www.example.com/mortgage/calculators/ The mortgage product's calculator page may list 20 different mortgage calculators I have on my site. It's <title> might look something like <title>Mortgage Calculator - Mortgage Loan Calculator - Mortgage Calculators</title> Then under the mortgage calculators page I might have a page for each individual calculator like: www.example.com/mortgage/calculators/mortgage-payment-calculator/ www.example.com/mortgage/calculators/adjustable-rate-mortgage-calculator/ www.example.com/mortgage/calculators/home-affordability-calculator/ www.example.com/mortgage/calculators/points-calculator/ etc. The mortgage points calculator page might have a <title> like <title>Points Calculator - Mortgage Points Calculator - Discount Points Calculator</title>. The key with Theme Pyramids is that (other than the global nav which usually appears on every page) pages should mainly link to pages above or below them... link to your parent and children within the pyramid. You avoid linking (where possible) across pyramids. What this does is make sure that most of the links leaving a given page links to pages about the same topic only more general (parent) or more specific/more long tail (children). Because they are about the same topics just more general or specific, those links are relevant links. Breadcrumbs link only to the pages above which would always be within the same pyramid. So they are a great way to reinforce your theme pyramids. The content of the pages should have contextual links mainly to pages above and below. I converted our site to this model with the last redesign, and our PR distribution and rankings went through the roof compared to before.
Hey Canonical. Thanks for the response. I figured you would be one of the only people to come up with an answer to my question. +rep I think our website is already setup much like you describe. Despite this Google is still choosing to rank some of our supplies pages above our upper level pages. If it still kept our rankings on the first page, I wouldn't be as concerned. In your mortgage example, what would you do if one of the weaker mortgage articles was ranking for 'mortgage calculator' instead of the mortgage page itself?
Sorry... Was out late with friends last night. But... In the above example, I wouldn't worry too much about it. I would be thankful that I have a page ranking for that keyword phrase, and just make sure that a) users looking for "mortgage calculator" know they can find calculators if they click on the article link and 2) once they click on the article link that it is easy for them to navigate to the mortgage calculator page and find what they were looking for to begin with. This would buy me time to make the 'real' mortgage calculator page outrank the article for that term. If an article were ranking for "mortgage calculator" instead of the actual mortgage calculator page then I would probably do three things: 1) Short-term: Change the <meta> description on the article so that it includes a description of the article AND promotes our http://www.example.com/mortgage/calculators/. I would want the users when they see the snippet in the SERPs to know that they can get to the calculators from the article page so that they will click through to the article. 2) Short-term: On the article page, I would place a spotlight component (a <div> w/ a nice border or different background color to attract the visitor's attention) that talks about the fact that we have mortgage calculators on the site with links to 3 of my individual calculators that live just below the /mortgage/calculators/ page (and a one sentence description of each calculator) and a 4th link that says something like, "Try another Mortgage Calculator" that links to the main http://www.example.com/mortgage/calculators/ page. This is definitely a relevant page linking to my http://www.example.com/mortgage/calculators/ page because it already ranks for the phrase "mortgage calculator" so it should not only direct those visitors looking for calculators to the right place, but it is also another inbound link pointing to my mortgage calculators page from a relevant page with the exact link text I would be trying to rank for. Having the 1 sentence description of the 3 calculators and the 4 links to calculator pages will also strengthen the article page's on-page content-based ranking factors. 3) Long-term: I would work on getting more backlinks to my http://www.example.com/mortgage/calculators/ page with the link text "mortgage calculator" and some slight variations like "mortgage calculator tools". I would look to see if I can add links on my site to the mortgage calculator page with the above link text(s). I would consider adding a site-wide footer link to the http://www.example.com/mortgage/calculators/ page w/ link text "mortgage calculator" if it is a very important keyword phrase that a) drives a lot of conversions or b) drives a lot of traffic (or both). Eventually, getting more links to the http://www.example.com/mortgage/calculators page should result in an indented listing so now I have 2 pages showing in the organic results. Then as the backlink profile of the http://www.example.com/mortgage/calculators/ gains more strength for the phrase "mortgage calculator" than the article page has, the http://www.example.com/mortgage/calculators/ should become my first listing with the article as the indented list. One thing I've noticed with the theme pyramid approach we used on our redesigned site is that now, almost everytime that we rank for a keyword phrase we have an indented listing in the SERPs. Only our really long tail phrases don't have indents with them. But anytime one of our pages that are 1, 2, or 3 levels below the home page ranks, we almost always have a page directly above or below that also ranks with it so we get 2 back-to-back listings.
Thanks for all your help. I have already done #2 and #3. The main product pages have sitewide links and far more backlinks than the parts/supplies pages. Still some of those less important pages are listed in results instead of the main product pages. The problem is that the parts/supplies pages rank much lower than the main product pages should. I would be thankful for the rankings, but they are too low to get any traffic. Obviously a supplies page is going to get lower click through rates than a page actually targeting the main product. I know how to get rankings and traffic, but I am still having problems with pages competing with one another. I guess I'll try limiting the use of the main product names on other pages and then concentrate on getting even more backlinks to the main product pages. Really this seems like an ideal place to give certain pages lower priority levels in my sitemap, but I don't know how much search engines follow those priority levels. Perhaps I'll give that a try soon as well. Any other suggestions if my main goal is to get the main product pages ranked instead? I realize the benefits of the indented 2-for-1 listings, but it doesn't mean much if I can't get that listing to the frontpage yet.
I'm busy tonight and tomorrow night... but I got your PM and plan to spend a little time this weekend looking at your site to see if there are any tweaks you can make such as navigation changes, etc. that can score you a big instant win in this regard. Perhaps someone else will come up with some good suggestions in the meantime. Sorry... just don't have a lot of time today or tomorrow. I like to look through your site AND your backlinks (and those of your competitors) usually a couple hours before coming to any real conclusions or making any specific suggestions. But I will set aside some time this weekend for it.
Wow thanks! I appreciate that. Somebody's got some more +rep coming their way lol. You are hands down the most helpful person on this forum.
A lot of good recommendations here. I believe that you should apply more targeted links with appropriate keyword anchor text throughout your website to specific pages to show the search engines what is relevant for certain terms and what is not. That has helped me grab a lot of top rankings for terms like Professional search engine optimization and others.