Landing pages "dropping" and being replaced with homepage?

[SanjidaKazi]

Hi Moz People

Happy new year to all, I have an interesting one here.

I have recently been making some landing pages and they have all pretty much hit page 1 for the search terms I've focused on (UK Domain).

Up until this morning the landing page was the 8th organic result on the UK domain. However I have checked this morning and the landing page has dropped below the top 50 and instead our homepage is now showing as the last organic result on page 1.

This is intriguing to me as it has also happened to a couple of other landing pages I have made. Is this due to the relevance being driven higher by the landing pages but overall the homepage is more important to Google? Do you guys think this might start happening to the other pages that I have created? Any input would be appreciated!

( Ill give you links and search terms if you want to take a look for yourselves but I try to refrain from "self advertising" )

Happy Thursday Mozzers !

• Jamie

[CommT]

Google 'tests' landing pages quite a lot actually. I'd have a poke around in your analytics programme and see what the bounce rate, time on site, pages per visit for each landing page. If the homepage is performing better in these areas than your landing pages then that may be why this is happening. Also look in your webmaster tools at organic CTR - if the homepage has a higher CTR then Google is assuming it's more relevant for the query.

My hunch is that this is the issue - once you've got the comparison data you can look at ways of making your landing pages better for user engagement.

Good luck,

Amelia

[SanjidaKazi]

Hi Amelia

Interestingly the bounce rate for the page that has dropped is lower than the Homepage. Landing page has a 25% bounce rate while the Homepage is 26.46%.

Average time on page is slightly lower than the Homepage. The only issue here is this was a relatively new landing page and there are older ones that are actually ranking higher with much higher bounce and exit rates. In fact one of the pages that has been ranked #3 for the past month has a bounce rate of over 60%!

The only trend I am noticing is the "time on page" being higher on the landing pages that haven't been effected. I guess this is coming down to a user engagement issue as you suggest. I'll try some more provocative wording to see if that helps although now there will be little to no clicks on the effected landing pages as they have dropped so low!

Thank you for your thoughts

**** UPDATE

After doing a little more comparison it appears that the time on page theory has no weight either as the high ranking pages all have pretty low time on page also... back to the think tank lol.

[TheeDigital]

In cases where there are multiple relevant pages, Google can show different ones. Drill down in Webmaster Tools under search queries and click one of the terms. You will see how often each page is shown as well as how often the results were returned in different positions.

[SanjidaKazi]

Hi Richard

Good shout, after doing some research it looks as though the page that has now been replaced with the homepage actually got 100% CTR for a search term that isn't really relevant to our service. Only 1 click though.

However the relevant searches did get a good few impressions but didn't get a single click. I guess that is going to have something to do with the sudden change.

Seems a bit harsh to take action with only 1 click ...