Passing of link juice for lead gen site

[darklocal]

Hi guys. So I’ve got a basketball website that has a news page. I have about 300 news posts, but the main part of my website is lead gen pages for all the basketball teams, league tables, page fixtures etc.

How should I treat the news articles so that they don’t steal link juice from the main basketball team lead generation pages? I still want them to be found in the SERPs. Should I be canonicalizing all of the articles so that they point to the respective basketball team mentioned in the article? What if the article focuses on all of the basketball teams? I’m a bit mixed on what the best solution is... Thanks in advance

 

[Ryuzaki]

How should I treat the news articles so that they don’t steal link juice from the main basketball team lead generation pages? I still want them to be found in the SERPs.

This is kind of mutually exclusive. If you make it so the news posts don't get juice, then they're not going to get found in the SERPs. If you canonicalize them elsewhere, then the other pages will get credit for the juice and the news ones won't be found in the SERPs.

I think a better question to be asking, instead of "how do I stop the news articles from hurting my lead gen pages?", would be "how do I use the news articles to help my lead gen pages?".

Yes, they'll drain some page rank away from your lead gen pages. But if they interlink to the lead gen pages they'll send page rank back and also relevancy and anchor texts of your choosing. And if they're worth posting at all, you can use them for promotion which means they'll be getting links of their own. And if that's the case then they'll send more juice to the lead gen pages than they steal, by far.

Another benefit is that the news articles are going to be helping your domain obtain topical relevancy, which will help your lead gen pages rank too, if they're rankable.

If none of this sounds suitable to you, then I fear your choices will be to either move the news to a sub-domain and never link to the sub-domain, only from the sub-domain back to the top level domain. Alternatively you could have a completely separate site for the news and only link one way to the lead gen site.

I'd just make the news posts work in my favor like described above. You decided on creating a news section and all that for a good reason. It should work to your benefit, even if you change nothing.