What to do if the wrong page is ranking?
-
What to do if the wrong page of your website is ranking and you cannot 301 it?
Apparently an outsourced company the previous manager hired build anchor text links to the homepage, when those links should have been pointing to a deeper page.
As a result, the hompage is now ranking for that term. But I think we can convert a lot more of the visitors if the deeper page is there instead. Obviously, I can't 301 the homepage.
What would you do?
-
Rand also has some advice in his post about this at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions
-
Though it is not guaranteed that the correct page will start to rank but I think following changes might work. Add a link to the respective page you want to rank from the Home page of the site with the desired Anchor Text. Note that this link should not be in the footer but at a prominent position on the Home so it transfers most relevance as per Search Engines.
Try to get some natural links for the respective page without worrying about the anchor text. Make sure that the page you are trying to rank has optimized titles and other page elements with respect to keyword.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How does Googlebot evaluate performance/page speed on Isomorphic/Single Page Applications?
I'm curious how Google evaluates pagespeed for SPAs. Initial payloads are inherently large (resulting in 5+ second load times), but subsequent requests are lightning fast, as these requests are handled by JS fetching data from the backend. Does Google evaluate pages on a URL-by-URL basis, looking at the initial payload (and "slow"-ish load time) for each? Or do they load the initial JS+HTML and then continue to crawl from there? Another way of putting it: is Googlebot essentially "refreshing" for each page and therefore associating each URL with a higher load time? Or will pages that are crawled after the initial payload benefit from the speedier load time? Any insight (or speculation) would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mothner1 -
SEO: How to change page content + shift its original content to other page at the same time?
Hello, I want to replace the content of one page of our website (already indexeed) and shift its original content to another page. How can I do this without problems like penalizations etc? Current situation: Page A
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daimpa
URL: example.com/formula-1
Content: ContentPageA Desired situation: Page A
URL: example.com/formula-1
Content: NEW CONTENT! Page B
URL: example.com/formula-1-news
Content: ContentPageA (The content that was in Page A!) Content of the two pages will be about the same argument (& same keyword) but non-duplicate. The new content in page A is more optimized for search engines. How long will it take for the page to rank better?0 -
My page ranking dropped after I made it responsive
Recently, I made one of my site page responsive. It was ranking on 13th Position and after I made the page responsive, it dropped to 24 desktop and 35 on mobile rankings. I ran mobile friendly test and it said "awesome, your page is mobile friendly". Not sure, what went wrong here. Page in question is: https://www.itcontractorsuk.com/ Can someone please advice? Please Note: My site is partially responsive.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThinkWebUK0 -
Our web site lost ranking on google a couple of years ago. We have done lots of work on it but still can not improve our search ranking. Can anyone give us some advise
A couple of years ago the ranking on our site dropped over night. I believe someone working here at the time purchased links about that time. We have been doing lots of work on the site since then to improve it. We can not get our rankings back up on google searches. Can anyone give us some advise about what to do or where to go for some help that we can trust.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Ranking for homepage & category page?
We lost our Google organic ranking (position 1 - 3) for our highest converting key phrase (cotton tees) in February. The ranking was for our homepage (brandname.com) which is very image heavy and doesn't have much readable content. We noticed that all of our competitors are ranking above us for their category page, not their homepage. The difference between us and our competitors is that we specialize in this key phrase and they just offer one category of the key phrase. For example, we only sell cotton tee's and they sell cotton tees, handbags and shoes. When we dropped we noticed that Google began showing our homepage AND category page in the results, so we pointed our brandname.com to brandname.com/cotton-tees canonically. The idea was that this would assure that the homepage and category page were not competing with each other. The homepage was not really optimized for cotton tees so we thought this might help. 1. Is there any harm in removing the canonical and allowing both pages to rank? (We're also working on redesigning the homepage to add more readable text & optimize for cotton tees.) 2. Our homepage URL used to be "brandname.com/cotton-tees" and we consistenly ranked between 1 and 3 for cotton tees during that time. We modified the homepage URL because it seemed spammy and are now just "brandname.com". Does it make sense to go back to the URL with the key phrase in it if that is our main product and we want to rank for it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
Many pages small unique content vs 1 page with big content
Dear all, I am redesigning some areas of our website, eurasmus.com and we do not have clear what is the best
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eurasmus.com
option to follow. In our site, we have a city area i.e: www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla which we are going
to redesign and a guide area where we explain about the city, etc...http://eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla/guide/
all with unique content. The thing is that at this point due to lack of resources, our guide is not really deep and we believe like this it does not
add extra value for users creating a page with 500 characters text for every area (transport...). It is not also really user friendly.
On the other hand, this pages, in long tail are getting some results though is not our keyword target (i.e. transport in sevilla)
our keyword target would be (erasmus sevilla). When redesigning the city, we have to choose between:
a)www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla -> with all the content one one page about 2500 characters unique.
b)www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla -> With better amount of content and a nice redesign but keeping
the guide pages. What would you choose? Let me know what you think. Thanks!0 -
Can use of the id attribute to anchor t text down a page cause page duplication issues?
I am producing a long glossary of terms and want to make it easier to jump down to various terms. I am using the<a id="anchor-text" ="" attribute="" so="" am="" appending="" #anchor-text="" to="" a="" url="" reach="" the="" correct="" spot<="" p=""></a> <a id="anchor-text" ="" attribute="" so="" am="" appending="" #anchor-text="" to="" a="" url="" reach="" the="" correct="" spot<="" p="">Does anyone know whether Google will pick this up as separate duplicate pages?</a> <a id="anchor-text" ="" attribute="" so="" am="" appending="" #anchor-text="" to="" a="" url="" reach="" the="" correct="" spot<="" p="">If so any ideas on what I can do? Apart from not do it to start with? I am thinking 301s won't work as I want the URL to work. And rel=canonical won't work as there is no actual page code to add it to. Many thanks for your help Wendy</a>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
Home Page Rankings Drop
Hi all we have being working with a small local client in the last few weeks getting good rankings using onsite op, and business listings we have been getting good ranking ie top 15 then today we drop right out the top 50, after completing manual checks i see the keywords as all related | glasgow catering | Not in Top 50 | down > 42 | |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Will_Craig
| catering glasgow | Not in Top 50 | down > 41 | |
| glasgow caterers | Not in Top 50 | down > 39 | |
| caterers in glasgow | Not in Top 50 | down > 37 | |
| caterers glasgow | Not in Top 50 | down > 32 | Also when completing manual checks on the above keywords, the home page is not ranking what so ever, infact its missing i went 300 results deep and cant find it, other inner pages rank but not the home. The only other recent change is that we now have a listing under the Google maps section of the homepage on page 1 any advice www.georgieporgies.co.uk0