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
-
Removing many pages from my site a problem?
I have to remove two blog categories from my site which amounts to about 98 pages. I will redirect the URLS to other appropriate pages on my site. Will Google rank my site different if I lose that many pages?
Link Building | | artsp1 -
How To increase page authority and domain authority
i create 1000+ back links for my website Dramasapps.com but page authority and domain authority is 1. How To increase ??
Link Building | | Starelse0 -
Blog snippets on home page
Mozzes, We're running a real estate portal in which we have a pretty good news/blog section running on wordpress. It's placed into our LAMP site on a dash from our root URL: www.ourportal.com/news/ To attract traffic via our landing pages we publish article snippets from the blog, linked to the complete articles. What would be the optimal SEO here to lead the spiders to the orignal content? Follow, Noindex? Best Johan
Link Building | | PropertyPortal1 -
How to Build Links without content?
Apart from Directory submission Local niche specific directory submission Community engagement Niche specific blog commenting Can I know the other ways of Link Building when we don't have content.
Link Building | | Jaymoo0 -
Link from each page or only from homepage
In addition to my main site (A), I also have another website (B) (question/answer) type, which has over 400,000 indexed pages in Google. I'm trying to do linkbuilding for a.com: should I link from B to A ? should I place a link only on the homepage of B? should I place a link on homepage of B and each of the 400,000 pages to A? should place multiple links on B to A.com/subdirectories/ thank you.
Link Building | | limens0 -
Ranking above Auth domains question?
Hi, How difficult would it be to rank a new page above the likes of Wiki, About, Squidoo etc? I have a keyword I would like rank but most of the domains on first page are the likes of the above, wiki, about, squidoo etc. The pages themselves dont have a high Page Auth its just the root domain. Will it still be very hard to rank above these types of sites? Cheers
Link Building | | activitysuper0 -
Struggles with Rankings
Links seem to be very important to the success of websites today. That said, they are real tough to come by in my specific industry. Plus the president of the company does not want any links on the site, so,................... thats where I am. I paid for links in the past and that was a big mistake!! I am still looking to gain a few links for the website (www.allianceconcretepumps.com) is ezinearticles.com a good location to post aricles in hopes to get links? If it is a good location, do you know of any other ones which would be beneficial? I know I could use some more and better sight content......... I have quite a lot of fresh stuff in the works not just up yet. Hopefully in the next few weeks.........? Any other words from the wise are very much welcome. Thank You Dave
Link Building | | APICDA0 -
Linkbuilding on deep Blog pages
So I think I've got a good strategy going but wanted to get others feedback on it... I've been link building on a lot of blogs via reviews and giveaways. Frequently, these blogs give my posts limited exposure on the Home Page because the posts quickly get buried by new posts and eventually pushed off the home page to the "older posts" pages. Sometimes, reviews never even touche the home page because they live one level down on a "reviews" page which typically has 0 inbound links and low page authority. In these cases, I will use OSE to find the blog post with the strongest back link profile and request a link on that page instead. Typically, these posts are 2-3 years old so the bloggers are usually happy to give an old page some action. I'm a bit concerned though..Since these pages are frequently old, their content has not changed for years. Essentially, the pages have gone stale. Am I getting any benefit from these links? They typically have the 2nd best Page Authority on the Domain, but I'm wondering if the lack of fresh content kills all the value.
Link Building | | znotes0