Keyword drop with its own appropriate landing page

[matti_wilson]

I have a question to ask.  I have these two generic keywords - e.g. shoe and shoes. These two keywords have its own landing pages - www.example.com/shoe.aspx and www.example.com/shoes.aspx

Now here is my dilemma. Every time I do link building on these keywords using its own landing pages (www.example.com/shoe.aspx and www.example.com/shoes.aspx), the landing page which is  "www.example.com/services.aspx" is the one that ranks on the SERPs while the appropriate landing pages (www.example.com/shoe.aspx and www.example.com/shoes.aspx) go down in the results.  So what I did was I started using the services page ( www.example.com/services.aspx) for both keywords - shoe and shoes. Now what happened then and now was that, the shoe and shoes appropriate pages (www.example.com/shoe.aspx and www.example.com/shoes.aspx) go up in the SERPs while the services page (www.example.com/services.aspx) go down.

I do not know what to do. Pls help

[grasshopper]

Hi Matti,

First, I think you have to seriously evaluate the criteria you're using to determine whether independent pages "deserve" to exist.  If I take the example you provided literally, there is no way that individual URLs need to exist for plural versus singular versions of the same root term.  I used to see a lot of that in the online education space about 8 or 9 years ago, and it was very effective - you could get different URLs ranking for "online college" and "online colleges" just through aggressive on-page optimization, even though there was nothing materially different about the content on the pages.  Back then it was a pretty spammy tactic, but these days there's no excuse.  Depending on the extent that you pursue this strategy, you could have a lot of very low-value content on your site that paints a big bulls-eye on your site for Panda.

However, taking a look at your other problem - a more general category page out-ranking the more specific product page, this often comes down to a link authority issue.  Sometimes a category page will only have one or two instances of the target keyword on it (e.g. a link to the Shoes page), but that will be the page that ends up ranking instead of the Shoes page.  An engine is trying to surface results based on 1) relevance and 2) authority, so in this case, the authority of the category page (more link juice) trumps the fact that it's less specifically relevant than to product page.  The engine is telling you that you need a link authority of X to rank for that term, and right now the category page has that level of link authority, while the product pages don't.

If your product pages really do deserve to exist (e.g. address keyword markets that have search volume, provide valuable services, and present value-added content not available elsewhere on the web), then I would maintain the structure of a category page linking to individual product pages, with the product pages targeting the most specific terms. As the product pages gain link authority over time (because they're valuable and worth linking to, right?), they will displace the category page in the SERPs.

Hope that helps.