Where does link authority get passed to a stand alone landing page

[Exclaimer-286885]

Hi All,

We are currently building a landing page that contains a bunch of funny top 10's, some that aren’t suitable for all customers, it can only be accessed from a PR source or recipient of one of our emails.

The question I have is; where will the authority gained from people linking to this page go? Would it be passed to the home page, if there’s a link to it? Or would you recommend a way to control it?

Any insight welcome.

Cheers

Neal

[YannickVeys]

I would suggest linking to a page that is relevant to the landing page you are creating. Your home page is usually receiving more than enough links from various sources. The underlying pages are often the problem. So try linking to a page that is relevant to the top 10 you created and is in a competitive space.

[SimonCullum]

That's a good answer from Yannick.  I have another perspective for you to consider also: (always good to have options)

I'd like to add that if this landing page does not have any internal links pointing to it from other pages within your website, you'll effectively be saying that this page is not important, as it's rather hidden away.

That's a big enough factor to push the strength of that page down, even with some good inbound links to it, so may not much matter about linking to other pages from it to pass-on some of that page strength.

In my view, it's best to have this page as a NoIndex page as it's clearly not there for all users. You'll otherwise risk this page being classed as a doorway page purely there for link building and not for users, could risk a penalty in the worst case scenario. You could still link out to other Relevant pages from it then.

Regards

Simon

[Exclaimer-286885]

Hi Simon, thanks for your reply. I hope things at Towergate are well, i know the company well.

To make sure that I have your comments correct, you suggest having an internal page, in our site, link to it or mark it as no index? Otherwise we risk crawlers seeing this as a link building exercise, which is potentially damaging?

Classing the page as no index and adding links to relevant page - does that still pass on any authority you may be getting from external links?

Thanks again

Neal

[SimonCullum]

Hi Neal

All going well thank you, busy times as always!

Yep, that's right, to avoid having a page (from a search engine's perspective) that is for search and not for all users (a hidden page), place a NoIndex on the page, or link to it from another 'normal' page so that it can be navigated to.

The tag for a NoIndex would be:   so answering your other question, with that Follow attribute the links to other pages within your site would be followed and any page authority shared, even though the page is tagged as NoIndex.

All the best,

Simon