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.
Need advice: How to replace a high-ranking pdf with a landing page -- without dropping much in rank?
-
Hi! We have a pdf of a white paper on our site that ranks #1 for a niche term. We are now exploring the idea of building a landing page for this paper with an overview (2-3 paragraphs) and a registration form for interested parties to fill out in order to access the paper.
Do you think there'd be any hope of ensuring the new landing page would rank almost as well eventually (top 3)? I'm thinking a key consideration would be preserving the link juice from the existing links that are coming into the pdf, and that 301 redirecting the pdf URL to the new landing page URL could help with that. Am I right? Or would it be better to try to reach out to the linking sites and ask them to update their links (seems daunting).
Any advice/opinions on this situation would be appreciated. (If folks think that there would be a significant risk of permanently dropping out of the top 5 by attempting this, we would likely choose to leave the pdf ungated as is.) Thanks!!
-John
-
Thanks Chris, Bernadette and Donna for your thoughtful answers. After considering your advice (and the resources you shared), I think it's worth a try. If nothing else, it will be a good experiment (and fairly low risk -- even though the pdf ranks #1, it's not a high-volume term). I think it will be important for the landing page to provide a really meaty, useful synopsis (as Chris suggested) that still offers some value on its own. Thanks again!
-John
-
John,
Not long ago, you should have fully expected to lose up to 15% of a page's SEO equity with a 301 redirect. That changed in February of this year when Google's John Mueller announced that no page rank is lost with 301 or 302 redirects.
Moz's own Cyrus Shepard wrote a What You Need To Know Post after that announcement. I think if you read it, you'll be well equipped to weigh your options and decide on the best path forward for this particular situation.
-
John, that's a good question. Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword, I would hesitate to set up a 301 redirect--you still may see ranking changes if you replaced it with a landing page.
I suspect that the reason why it's ranking is because other sites are linking directly to the PDF file, the content. If you were to remove that PDF, they might stop linking to it.
One option would be to edit the PDF file and make that PDF the landing page (in .pdf format), that would be the same URL.
-
Hello John, interesting dilemma you have. I think you have a good idea as well. I would be interested to learn about the level of competition for this term, I imagine it can not be that intensive if your PDF is ranking #1.
My recommendation would be to build the landing page, but include some of the content from your PDF as a preview. You can then offer the free download sign up to continue reading. It's likely the PDF is ranking well because of the content.
Of course you will want to create a 301 redirect to the new landing page from the old PDF URL. Also, keep the same title tag or anchor text that people are using to link to the PDF or the title that Google is currently giving the PDF. I think you have a good chance of retaining the #1 ranking if done right.
You may also have meta information within your PDF that you will want to migrate to the landing page. We're a big fan of landing pages at AdFicient and this sounds like a promising opportunity. Best of luck.
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
-
Parent pages : Duplicate content
Hello, I think this question relates to "Parent pages" structure or SILO but I couldn't find an answer online. For a website that sell products, for example "Appliances". A link to this page appears in 1 category of the menu named "kitchen" but also in another 1 category named "household appliances". It means that it appears twice in the menu but with a unique URL. Would that affect SEO ? Is it duplicate content ? And would it be better to choose 1 father or let it that way ? Thanks for your help. Max
Link Building | | Sodimaccl1 -
Does no-indexed page has an impact on bounce rate
my question is: I have a page that contains some external links, I know when visitors click on them and leave my site it hurts my bounce rate, But I have a solution for that, I am using external link redirection code, with this code after users clicking on external links they are not leaving my site and first went to some link like this: "http://mysite.com/redirect/https://externalsite.com/" and after 10 seconds they redirect to the external site, I make this redirect page noindex and nofollow. but the question is does this noindex page can decrease my page bounce rate because users don't leave my site and first go to another page of my site. but I don't know does no-indexed page has an impact on bounce rate or my struggle is worthless
Link Building | | mmohammadi1250 -
Sudden drop in external links... why?
We had a lot of external links (2.5K, which was good compared to our competition), but in the last few weeks, it dropped 1.1K. I obviously did something wrong. What are the causes of such a dramatic drop like that? Questions, suggestions, ideas, anything is welcome at this point. Thanks!
Link Building | | brandon_lee0 -
Rankings Dropped After New Backlinks.
I have a low-traffic website (under 100 unique visitors per day) and I've encountered a strange issue started yesterday morning. I acquired three back-links, one of these back-links is contextual and the other two are site-wide. The site-wide back-links are from PA 40+ blogs. It looks like the back-links are already indexed by Google. Despite these new back-links, my rankings across multiple keywords have dropped several positions. I'm new to SEO, but I would assume new back-links would improve my rankings. None of these back-links are low quality links, they are from real established blogs with high domain and page authority values. Could anyone give me insights into why my rankings may have dropped with new back-links?
Link Building | | poke11 -
Backlinks from the Same Domain (But Different Pages)
Wayyy back when (in the days of yore) Mr Cutts spelled out in a video that page rank is distributed equally between the external links on the page. If there are two links on a page, each gets passed 50% of the available page rank etc. (Perhaps an oversimplification but bear with me). As a result of this, the company I worked for at the time (this was the dark ages when sidebar homepage links were in vogue) decreed that we would only ever approach a site about a link for a client once, as additional links had little extra SEO Value. Now you could argue that if there are 5 external links, each acquiring 20% of the power, and your site has 2 of those, you are getting 40% of the power, but lets forget the basic math for a minute. I have scoured the web and Mr Cutts' videos and I cannot find the answer to my question: If my site (Site A) has a backlink from SiteB Page 1, and a backlink from SiteB page 2 - does this count as two separate links in the eyes of Google? If the SAME site links out to my site, linking to different pages in different posts, does this give me more SEO benefit? Thanks for your time!
Link Building | | Turkey0 -
Drop in Links According to Webmaster Tools
Webmaster tools is telling me the links to my site has dropped by 100,000 links in one month. Can someone please tell me what may have happened?
Link Building | | Professor0 -
Should I 301 Redirect The index.html Page?
Hello, As an experiment I am trying to work with an SBI site but am noticing index.html is being forced on me as the homepage. As I understand it's good practice to 301 redirect the index.html page to the to the actual home page. Can someone please confirm that I am right in thinking this? Here is an example: http://www.anguilla-beaches.com/index.html
Link Building | | umtmedia
http://www.anguilla-beaches.com/ According to yahoo 773 links are pointing to the index.html page and 771 links are pointing to the / page. I'm sure Google knows that these are the same pages and does not consider them as duplicate but surely the index.html page should be redirected right? am I going mad here? Now if we look at this site: http://www.jugglenow.com the homepage has 198 links according to yahoo
http://www.jugglenow.com/index.html this page also has 198 links? now I am confused, are these 2 the same page? On this page: http://www.jugglenow.com/juggling-balls.html notice how there is no link to the actual homepage but there is a link to the index.html page. Am I missing something here because I can't figure it out, surely there should be just 1 homepage without a index.html page. Any help would be appreciated0 -
Need ideas to get do follow links from highly competative niche "wedding"
I need to get high quality do-follow links and my target market/keyword is ‘Maui wedding’ and a few others. Because it is such a competitive market I am having a hard time getting links from local companies providing Maui Weddings (I know why because they are my competitors) and national companies sites aren't much help because they are trying to provide leads to their advertisers. I would like do-follow links from non-paid sources any ideas or resources you could help with would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Link Building | | photoseo10