Thursday 8 October 2015

Ranking Uplift Given To Sub URLs



On Thursday the 1st October we started to get some interesting reports from our clients. The reports were a combination of people suffering either a lowering or uplift in ranking. We immediately got to work on investing the situation. Then late last week we tweeted some breaking news:



After some quick analysis we saw a definite pattern where main URLs were suffering a drop and sub URLs an uplift in fortunes.

Let’s use Click Submit as an example:

At the start of the week we were on page 8 for our home page "clicksubmit.co.uk" on the search term “SEO” (remember this is the probably the most competitive search term in the world). On Thursday we noticed we had jumped to page 5 for our sub URL"clicksubmit.co.uk/seo". Since then we have made even more progress and are now page 4. We also went to position 1 for our search term “Resell SEO” on the sub page "clicksubmit.co.uk/reseller-seo" see: https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=resell+seo.

If you go to Google and type in any search term you will now find the first page pretty much loaded with sub URL results. An example would be for the search term “SEO”. Take a look at the results at: https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=seo. There is now only one listing that resolves to a home page!

To be honest we're amazed it's taken this long because it does make sense. Google want to connect their users with the most relevant content as quickly as possible and it’s more likely that a page within your site which contains more detailed information on a subject is more relevant.

We launched our Sub URL optional extra around 2 years ago with the forethought of this update and now many of our clients are getting their reward. We have also been suggesting for the last 4 years within every clients initial report that trail pages (depth of content) is crucial. Here’s a snippet from an example initial report:

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3. Trail content. We would suggest creating pages of text based information for each of your keywords with a link to each one of these pages from your home page. For example, one of your keywords/phrases is 'Search term 1', so why not create a page on your website called 'Search term 1' with some general content on it, then add a link to this page from the most relevant pages on your website. This may not be possible for all of your keywords and phrases, but where you have a keyword or phrase that you could write some content about, it can be of great benefit.
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We can say with some confidence that our users were well prepared for this update and we have seen on the whole a lot of uplift over the last few days!

We hope you found this article insightful and if you have any questions please get in touch.