We had a website ranking #2 for one of our targeted keyword phrases in Google. We ranked #1 way back when, and have been at #2 for a few months. Last week I decided that I needed to do something about that. We have a main site, with a page at www.site.com/xxxxx_xxxxx.html. We also own xxxxx-xxxxx.com which was a forward to our www.site.com/xxxxx_xxxxx.html page, and that is what was ranking.
I decided that to get any real improvement on the keyword, we would need to have our main site.com page in the SERPS. We had been using a php header redirect to redirect users to the page we wanted them on. The problem with header redirects is that they don’t pass on any link juice when you use them. To get the benefit you need to use a 301 redirect. These are quite easy to setup in Apache.
Two days after I created the new redirect, I noticed that Google now recognized the new page like we were hoping for, but we had slipped to #4. I had faith in the fact that I made the right decision, and know that when SEs see something new, they can take some time to rank it properly. 3 days later we are now ranking #1 again. We made no changes to on-page factors at all.
By properly leveraging the link juice of our main site, combined with incoming links, we were able to improve our rankings in just 5 days. Not bad when the new #2 site is an authority site.
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