Dilution of link juice?

[Horizon]

Hi all,

I'm fairly new to SEOmoz, and have watched an interesting video about the dilution of link juice by having multiple pages all targeted towards the same (or, very similar) keywords. We have a medium to high SEOmoz domain authority - 59 - this is considerably higher than our rivals. Our nearest rival (in terms of authority) is in the high 40s. Despite this, our rivals appear higher on almost every competitive keyword. Our on-page SEO is generally quite good and historically our rankings have reflected this, but recently we are falling behind.

Just to give you an idea of our site, we have 4 areas all targeted to roughly the same thing:

Homepage - targeting the main aspect of our business, French property, living in France and holidays in France. Homepage is ranked highest for all major keywords to do with French property. Very little content, just a landing page, really.

Property landing page - targeting French property. Content is most articles about property trends, iframes from our property database, mortgages, currency, etc. Very little presence in search engines. 90% of search engine traffic to this zone is long tail.

Property buying guide - targeting French property buyers looking for general information. Content is articles about how or where to buy property, tips about grabbing a bargain, selling your home, etc. Better visibility in search engines than above, but not as good as home page.

Property database - targeting French property. Content is quite self explanatory - think Rightmove.fr. Extremely poor visibility in search engines.

Is our lower search engine ranking purely the result of diluted link juice? Or is there something else at play here? Why does our homepage outrank zones that specifically target property?

We are going to aggressively shake this up and plan to amend the targeting of the above zones so that they are all targeting different phrases. Is this going to work, or are we barking up the wrong tree?

Many thanks in advance.

Guy

[RyanKent]

Hi Guy.

The issue you described is known as cannibalization. Each page on your site should be optimized for one or two keywords or phrases. Any change at all to the phrase would be seen as a new phrase. For example "French property" and "French properties" are two different phrases.

With the above in mind, I would recommend examining your site to ensure the following:

• each page should have a primary focus. The page's title, header, and content should support that focus. One example of a site which executes this concept very well is wikipedia. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Navy

• each instance of the keyword phrase should be used as anchor text to link to the proper target page. A good example of this method is offered once again by Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_military. Notice when the phrase "French navy" is used, it shows as a text link to the French navy page.

• ensure there is not any case where the same phrase is used to link to multiple pages on your site. If you use "French property" to link to the property landing page once, then ensure you never use that identical phrase to link to any other page on your site.

Google will view anchor text as a strong indicator as to which page from your site should be listed for a given term. When the same phrase links to different pages, it causes confusion and your ranking on the phrase will suffer. When your site does receive a listing for a given phrase, the wrong page may be indexed as well.

[Horizon]

Thanks Ryan. This is exactly as expected... I fear we have a fair bit of cannibalization across the site, so better get on and make some changes.

Many thanks

Guy