Why I Removed Learn

Page 1 in Google

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301 redirect for the learn section

 

One area that I never really knew what to do with was the learn section. My goal was for that to be my video section here on the site and do a lot of tutorials. I figured the blog could just be a simple blog, but learn would be where users would go to watch all of my videos. My goal was in SEO to have the learn section, then be split into a photoshop and an SEO video section so when I did some link building it would of been a bit easier. Those sections would of been pretty specific and great for any generic keyword search. As a note, I will go over some link building techniques, but they will be in a video, not just a blog!

 

Here was what Lean looked like. It was pretty lame and had no imagination from myself

 

Learn

 

Regardless I only had one section in the learn which was top conversion paths in google analytics which looked awkward. After some time I started to think how much I should just 301 redirect that to the blog section and create a new blog post for that page. I looked at Open Site Explorer and pretty much agreed that the link power to those pages is so low anyway, this really would not cause much of a difference.

 

So earlier this week I have removed the section and did all of the 301 redirects. I set the canonical tag for that page just to let search engines know that this 301’d and also this is the preferred page.

 

Now this is really early but I just got my ranking report after doing this. Surprisingly, I jumped from position 12 to position 5 in Google! I also moved up in Bing and Yahoo. For now this is just the tracking data from Rank Checker

 

rankings jump from rank checker

 

Here are the results from Cute Rank  (second keyword tool I use)

 

Transparent Rankings TM Blast

 

What I take away from this change? Well I think that having that page under the blog makes my blog page even richer which helps trickle down some link power to this page. I changed the URL slightly and I think those changes have made the ranking change for the site!