Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What would cause the wrong category page to come up?
-
I am trying to figure out why the wrong thing is coming up in the serps. For example, we are trying to rank for used widgets. But when you type in used widgets in google the primary widget page doesn't come up, one of the secondary categories under used widgets comes up. What would cause this? What are things I should check?
-
Is it possible for you to give a clearer description of the categories? You say they are different products but that one is a second category of the other
Does the page you want to rank show up for any other searches? In your analytics are you getting any traffic from Google to that page?
-
I did the site search that you suggest- site:www.site.com widgets and it was in the correct order.
When I added the word used to the search it came up in the wrong order. They both have the word used, used the same amount of time. It makes no sense to me.
-
They actually are two separate types of items so I don't think I can canonical because I still want people to find the other category if that is what they are looking for. The names are so similar it is a problem.
I have an x category, y category, and xy category. Even though the names are the same, they are very different products.
-
Hi,
The best way I find to see what the search engines thinks is the best page from your site for a term is to do a site search with the term you are checking.
E.g.
site:yousite.com + Term
In your case : yousite.com + used widgets
This shows you the pages in order that Googles ranks them. Also its a good way to identify duplicated title tags.
Now there is an article published by Rand Fishkin on this issue to know what could be the possible reason to showing wrong category pages and how you can correct them .Please check once below article
http://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions
I hope it helps
Thanks
-
You could use a canonical tag to tell google which page is the desired page. Unless the other page also had targeted key terms on it. Then I would avoid the canonical tag and try to find a better way to optimize the other page for key terms not so closely related.
-
It is unfortunate, but they have almost the exact same name. I don't know how to differentiate them.
-
These titles are so close that google is probably flipping a coin.
-
For the term "used widget" ,the title for the page I want to rank is "used widget for sale". For the page I do not want it to rank for this term it is "used widget - type for sale".
-
It It has breadcrumbs and it shows the category in the level up mechanism for the category sort.
-
What are things I should check?
Proofread the title tags. Be sure that the one that you want to rank is the best optimized.
-
it can be that both pages are semantically similar and the robot is not sure which one from both should it rank
You could try to create an internal link in secondary category "url" to the url you want to rank, using the keyword as anchor. It may helps
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Merging Pages and SEO
Hi, We are redesigning our website the following way: Before: Page A with Content A, Page B with Content B, Page C with Content C, etc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
e.g. one page for each Customer Returns, Overstocks, Master Case, etc
Now: Page D with content A + B + C etc.
e.g. one long page containing all Product Conditions, one after the other So we are merging multiples pages into one.
What is the best way to do so, so we don't lose traffic? (or we lose the minimum possible) e.g. should we 301 Redirect A/B/C to D...?
Is it likely that we lose significant traffic with this change? Thank you,0 -
Substantial difference between Number of Indexed Pages and Sitemap Pages
Hey there, I am doing a website audit at the moment. I've notices substantial differences in the number of pages indexed (search console), the number of pages in the sitemap and the number I am getting when I crawl the page with screamingfrog (see below). Would those discrepancies concern you? The website and its rankings seems fine otherwise. Total indexed: 2,360 (Search Consule)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Online-Marketing-Guy
About 2,920 results (Google search "site:example.com")
Sitemap: 1,229 URLs
Screemingfrog Spider: 1,352 URLs Cheers,
Jochen0 -
Date of page first indexed or age of a page?
Hi does anyone know any ways, tools to find when a page was first indexed/cached by Google? I remember a while back, around 2009 i had a firefox plugin which could check this, and gave you a exact date. Maybe this has changed since. I don't remember the plugin. Or any recommendations on finding the age of a page (not domain) for a website? This is for competitor research not my own website. Cheers, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
PDF or HTML Page?
One of our sales team members has created a 25 page word document as a topical page. The plan was to make this into an html page with a table of contents. My thoughts were why not make it a pdf? Is there any con to using a PDF vs an html page? If the PDF was properly optimized would it perform just as well? The goal is to have folks click back to our products and hopefully by after reading about how they work.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Easy way to change wordpress category titles. Currently categories are appearing with the same title?!
I'm working on a wordpress adult dating review site and have started to set up categories for each of my main keywords. I have also started to add sub categories by county and town and so far have done so for the counties of 'Lincolnshire' and 'Derbyshire'. The problem is though that for each of my subcategories the page titles are appearing the same. For example: www.mysite.com/category/online-dating/lincolnshire/spalding (root category online dating) shows the title as 'Spalding'. www.mysite.com/category/adult-dating/lincolnshire/spalding also has the title 'Spalding' even though it's root category is different (adult dating). It's probably easier to go to http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com to see how it's set up. If you click in the category text in the top menu and navigate to dating/derbyshire/alfreton for example and then adult dating/derbyshire/alfreton you'll notice the page titles are the same. I use all in one SEO pack and have rewrite titles checked with category titles set to %category_title% | %blog_title%. I also use category SEO updater. In order to prevent duplicate content issues how can I simply make the title of each category category root title/category subtitle(county)/category subtitle 2(town). The title of each category page would then read for example Online Dating Lincolnshire Spalding.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640