Just a quick tip tonight, since technically I’m supposed to be on vacation. One great way to help improve some of your rankings on a blog, content site or virtually any domain with lots of pages on similar topics is to eliminate the keyword cannibalization by 301’ing multiple pages relevant to a query/keyword to the highest ranking page. Here’s a quick example:
For the query – SEO Pricing – SEOmoz has two results in the top ten:
If we were to redirect one page to the other, we’d have a considerable amount of additional ranking power, and probably move up the results considerably.
This tactic applies well to blogs where old posts might be less relevant than current ones. It also works on e-commerce sites where old products or product categories can be brought together. To find these potential joiners, just run a search like seo pricing site:seomoz.org. You can see three obvious candidates to be combined into one. We’re not going to do this because each of these has individual value, but maybe in 6-12 months, I might re-direct the oldest of the bunch as its relevance will probably be limited.
Another quick example:
This query – Ashland Oregon Wineries – shows that AshlandWineTours.com has several pages they could conceptually combine (as they appear to be targeting the same keywords on all those pages). They could even 301 those pages, then re-create new URLs for more targeted content if they so desired.
Of course, this can be a terrible idea from a user perspective, so be careful how you implement it.
p.s. Mystery Guest and I saw the Simpsons movie tonight – tons of fun…
