Who else is noticing a shift in deeper pages ranking?

[tomcraig86]

Without mentioning names, we're noticing a shift in many of our clients ranking pages.

Previously many of them held page 1 positions with their home page. We've been building brand only anchor text to these pages for some time now and there's a noticeable change in visibility to the domain as a whole displayed in GWT and there's an uplift in organic traffic too.

It just happens that some of our clients already had pages in the root directory that were very optimised for the clients' head terms, but all of a sudden, these sub pages with very few inbound links have started ranking in the place of the home pages. I've attached a screenshot of the landing page organic traffic. The pages in question have been there for at least 8-10 months.

These inner pages would not normally have been able to hold their ground in this position and I'm concerned that this is a temporary change. I can see this going one of two ways; (i) home page beings to out rank sub page as before, (i) sub page loses ranking ability and home page rank does not come back.

My questions to the community are therefore;

• **Has anyone else noticed this shift in ranking behaviour? **
• What are everyone's thoughts on this? - Will it remain this way?

From this query I can easily ask another wider question;

Good advice across the internet says we should be building strong brand links and citations to our clients' domains. Typically brand links go to the homepage, which should provide the homepage and (to a lesser extent the domain) with a ranking/traffic/visibility uplift. However, as I'm noticing other pages now picking up ranking boosts as a result of this;

• **Should we still be trying to gain links to these more commercial landing pages? **
• How are others building high quality links to pages full of commercial copy?

I hope this can spark a little bit of a debate. I look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts.

Thanks

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