Two Pages = Double Listing Love

If you want to make a site that looks legitimate and is well structured you probably only want to have one main page for each topic, with sub pages working to further expose sub-topics. But what do you do if you are tracking your results and are making a thousand a month or more from a single page? Some algorithms are somewhat literal in nature, while others are more elegant and look for more natural writing. I am still trying to tweak a page in to rank for all varieties of it's core main phrase in Google, but in the course of tweaking it in to match Google (by making it more elegant and less literal) that page does not score as being as relevant as it once was in Microsoft.

The ideal solution would be to just keep getting authoritative links until that page was viewed as the ultimately authoritative topical resource by all major engines, but unless you have real topical authority and high quality content it is going to be hard to get legitimate citations on the conversion oriented page. And getting it low quality link spam is not going to be the most cost efficient method if I care about the long-term health of the site. In fact, without trying to get any spammy links the page picked up hundreds of them just by ranking well.

What is another solution? Use the main page with the most link equity to target Google since they have the largest search market share, but also consider creating a second page on the topic which is more literal in nature. The second page can be about the history of the topic, background information, future of the topic, how that topic fits a location or a minority, saving money with topic, do it yourself with topic, or frequently asked questions related to the topic.

After making the first page less literal and creating the second page that was exceptionally literal I checked back on the rankings of both pages for some of the core keywords. For many of the phrases those pages targeted I scored a double listing in both MSN and Google.

As search engines change their relevancy scoring algorithms they may not only change weather they match deeper or shallower pages, but they may also change what they are willing to rank based on how literally it matches the query.

Another way to look at this phenomena is that if you are working from a new untrusted domain and are trying to create the backfill catalog of content for your site, it may make sense to make some of the early writing more literal in nature since it will be easy to rank well in MSN for it. As you learn more about your topic, get a bit of a following, and have some topical authority it may make sense to go back over some of your most important content areas and create new pages which are less literal in nature.