How do I get google to index the right pages with the right key word?
-
Hello I notice that even though I have a site map google is indexing the wrong pages under the wrong key words. As a result its not as relevant and is not ranking properly.
-
So this will stop google from ranking my site map on the first page for key words I want to rank for versus the actual page listed in the ite map?
-
Ah I understand perfectly what are trying to accomplish. You can put attributes in your XML file that indicate to a search engine spider how important the page is, but there is absolutely no guarantee that bots will pay any attention to it. In fact, they could use that as a negative indicator and discount those pages instead.
It's similar to the attribute in an XML file that tells a search engine how often the page is update. Because these things are easy to manipulate, I can almost guarantee that Google ignores them.
There is only one way to achieve what you want: be the best page on the planet for the keywords you want to rank for. That means writing mind-blowingly good content and getting more inbound links of higher quality than anyone else.
I hope that helps and gets you where you want to be.
Dana
-
To be a bit more specific. Instead of showing the page I want to show its actually ranking the sitemap page instead. The XML sitemap on page 1 lol.... I need the actual content to show....haha...
-
Hi ursalesguru. I'm not trying to be flippant, but man, if we all knew the answer to that question, none of us would be here.
It's a struggle. Search engine spiders like Googlebot are really stupid...no, really, they are. They can't see some of the obvious things that human beings can see when looking at a page. That's why SEOs spend so much time writing "alt" attributes, meta tags, <h>tags, transcribing videos, researching anchor text and building links and adding structured data as prescirbed by schema.org. All of this is an attempt to try to get search engines to see a page the way a human sees a page.</h>
Still, it's possible to get all that right and still lose. It requires time, patience and intelligent work. Our mutual frustration is one reason this forum is so gosh darned popular
Keep on keeping on. Learn, read, stay passionate. The rest will follow.
Dana
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
-
Best practices for types of pages not to index
Trying to better understand best practices for when and when not use a content="noindex". Are there certain types of pages that we shouldn't want Google to index? Contact form pages, privacy policy pages, internal search pages, archive pages (using wordpress). Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | RichHamilton_qcs0 -
Is my page being indexed?
To put you all in context, here is the situation, I have pages that are only accessible via an intern search tool that shows the best results for the request. Let's say i want to see the result on page 2, the page 2 will have a request in the url like this: ?p=2&s=12&lang=1&seed=3688 The situation is that we've disallowed every URL's that contains a "?" in the robots.txt file which means that Google doesn't crawl the page 2,3,4 and so on. If a page is only accessible via page 2, do you think Google will be able to access it? The url of the page is included in the sitemap. Thank you in advance for the help!
Technical SEO | | alexrbrg0 -
Issues Indexing Translated Pages
I'm having trouble getting http://www.procloud.ch/ to index for their german pages. The english pages are being indexed but not the german. Any ideas? Chris
Technical SEO | | ninel_P0 -
Google crawling but not indexing for no apparent reason
Client's site went secure about two months ago and chose root domain as rel canonical (so site redirects to https://rootdomain.com (no "www"). Client is seeing the site recognized and indexed by Google about every 3-5 days and then not indexed until they request a "Fetch". They've been going through this annoying process for about 3 weeks now. Not sure if it's a server issue or a domain issue. They've done work to enhance .htaccess (i.e., the redirects) and robots.txt. If you've encountered this issue and have a recommendation or have a tech site or person resource to recommend, please let me know. Google search engine results are respectable. One option would be to do nothing but then would SERPs start to fall without requesting a new Fetch? Thanks in advance, Alan
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
Why are my webpages not getting indexed?
I want to figure out why a lot of my pages for my website are not getting indexed by google. I have installed the SEO plugin by Yoast to my wordpress website. Under the titles and meta section of the plugin options I have set categories and tags to noindex. In WMT, google is saying that all my category pages and most of my tag pages are not being indexed. I want to make sure that the reason these pages are not being indexed are because of the SEO plugin. I want to prevent duplicate content so that is the reason I have set my categories and tags to noindex. Please respond if you know the absolute answer, its very important that I have my website indexed the proper way I want it to.
Technical SEO | | Dino640 -
CDN Being Crawled and Indexed by Google
I'm doing a SEO site audit, and I've discovered that the site uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that's being crawled and indexed by Google. There are two sub-domains from the CDN that are being crawled and indexed. A small number of organic search visitors have come through these two sub domains. So the CDN based content is out-ranking the root domain, in a small number of cases. It's a huge duplicate content issue (tens of thousands of URLs being crawled) - what's the best way to prevent the crawling and indexing of a CDN like this? Exclude via robots.txt? Additionally, the use of relative canonical tags (instead of absolute) appear to be contributing to this problem as well. As I understand it, these canonical tags are telling the SEs that each sub domain is the "home" of the content/URL. Thanks! Scott
Technical SEO | | Scott-Thomas0 -
Non-Canonical Pages still Indexed. Is this normal?
I have a website that contains some products and the old structure of the URL's was definitely not optimal for SEO purposes. So I created new SEO friendly URL's on my site and decided that I would use the canonical tags to transfer all the weight of the old URL's to the New URL's and ensure that the old ones would not show up in the SERP's. Problem is this has not quite worked. I implemented the canonical tags about a month ago but I am still seeing the old URL's indexed in Google and I am noticing that the cache date of these pages was only about a week ago. This leads me to believe that the spiders have been to the pages and seen the new canonical tags but are not following them. Is this normal behavior and if so, can somebody explain to me why? I know I could have just 301 redirected these old URL's to the new ones but the process I would need to go through to have that done is much more of a battle than to just add the canonical tags and I felt that the canonical tags would have done the job. Needless to say the client is not too happy right now and insists that I should have just used the 301's. In this case the client appears to be correct but I do not quite understand why my canonical tags did not work. Examples Below- Old Pages: www.awebsite.com/something/something/productid.3254235 New Pages: www.awebsite.com/something/something/keyword-rich-product-name Canonical tag on both pages: rel="canonical" href="http://www.awebsite.com/something/something/keyword-rich-product-name"/> Thanks guys for the help on this.
Technical SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
Getting Listed on Google Satellite Maps
How does a website get listed in the satellite version of Google Maps? I have clients that are ranking number 1 in the pack 7 with Google Places and local SEO but they don't show up on the big map. Click on this link to see what I mean http://connect7.biz/google-maps.jpg I have circled the listings in red. How are these businesses getting listed in the satellite version of Google Maps? Thanks
Technical SEO | | fun52dig
Gary0