inbound and onpage link targetting conflict

[cgrant]

We have successfully ranked a customer's homepage for 3 variations of a high-level term in their industry. With index positions between 8 and 15, we're looking to take the site to the next level.

While we're having wonderful success creating backlinks offpage, we'd like to continue growing their website onpage with fresh and unique content.

Here is our hang-up:

We've created a high-level subpage relevant to the keyword phrases we've been optimizing the home page for (also for grouping a larger portion of the hierarchy that was previously detached from any particular area). While our best case scenario would be to hold two positions in the top ten, one for the homepage and another indented for the subpage, we do not want to dilute our current rankings for the homepage; all of our backlinks for these keywords point to the homepage and are what we attribute our current success with.

If we point these onpage keywords to the subpage, what type of effect will this have on the ranking of the homepage? Should these links continue to point to the homepage as the offpage links do? We're hoping for a stable long term strategy and want to make sure our architecture is setup properly from the beginning.

Thanks!

[tedster]

This sounds like something I've been successful with - getting indented results, exactly as you hoped. And on some sites, with &filter=0 appended to the url for the SERP, I sometimes have many urls highly ranked.

The only issue I've hit at times is having the Home Page end up indented. But even when that happens, Google is often making a good judgement for that search term.

One note - depending on the phrase, it can also take a deep backlink or two pointing directly to the new page to get a second ranking strong enough to acquire the indented result.

[cgrant]

Is there a benefit to linking your subpages to your homepage with the anchor text of the keyword you'd like the hompage to improve on in the SERPS? I have a few sites where I have a non-relevant subpage ranking ahead of my homepage for a higher-level keyword. I'm struggling to shift focus in the serps to the homepage and off of the subpage. Incidentally, the subpage is ranking so high because it was used for deep-linking in a previous link-building campaign of ours.

What we've done as an experiment is to link the keyword in question from the subpage to the homepage- no changes yet.

[tedster]

Yes, that can help - but some people have also reported a ranking drop on that search after doing such an experiment (call it an over-optimization penalty, perhaps.)

My preference is to have such keywords in place at launch rather than to add them later - seems to me the reports of ranking frops all came from people who tried to tweak it later. Also, I would not use different keywords on the links in different subpages.

[cgrant]

What do you mean by "different keywords on the links in different subpages"?

[TheMadScientist]

Yes, that can help - but some people have also reported a ranking drop on that search after doing such an experiment (call it an over-optimization penalty, perhaps.)

I have done this occasionally, and I think the 'OOP', for lack of a better term, is correct but I also think it may be an 'SEO check' to determine if the edit was to 'rank better' or a 'change for focus / accuracy'.

There are times when I have reverted, but I made this type of change on one which I decided to leave, experienced an initial drop, then recovered.

I cannot personally say waiting out the change made an overall improvement in ranking for the term, but the changes are fairly recent and over the long term they may.

I have also had the same drop / recovery experience when adjusting linked phrases to internal pages... I personally think one of the issues causing some of the recently noted penalties is 'too much tinkering'.

[edited by: TheMadScientist at 2:03 am (utc) on April 16, 2008]

[tedster]

What do you mean by "different keywords on the links in different subpages"?

I mean linking from pageA to the home page with one keyword phrase, and linking from pageB to the same home page with a different phrase. That has definitely made trouble for some sites that tried it out.

[cgrant]

Thanks for clarifying. The keywords we're pointing to the homepage are synonymous and actually make better sense from a usability perspective to return the user to the homepage- I hope we don't get slapped on the wrist for something which benefits SEs and users!