Can we talk a bit more about cannibalisation? Will Google pick one page and disregard others.
-
Hi all.
I work for an e-commerce site called TOAD Diaries and we've been building some landing pages recently. Our most generic page was for '2017 Diaries'. Take a look here.
Initial results are encouraging as this page is ranking top page for a lot of 'long tail' search queries, e.g) '2017 diaries a4', '2017 diaries a5', '2017 diaries week to view' etc.
Interesting it doesn't even rank top 50 for the 'head term'... '2017 diaries'. **And our home page outranks it for this search term. **Yet it seems clear that this page is considered relevant and quality by Google it ranks just fine for the long tails.
Question: Does this mean Google 'chosen' our home page over the 2017-page landing page? And that's why the 2017-page effectively doesn't rank for it's 'head term'? (I can't see this as many times a website will rank multiple times such as amazon)
But any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Also, what would you do in this scenario? Work on home-page to try to push it up for that term and not worry about the landing page?
Any suggestions or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Hope that makes sense. Do shout if not.
Thanks in advance.
Isaac.
-
I think that "2017 Diaries" has a bit of competition and this site is still getting started. It probably has slowly rising traffic but needs some high-quality linkable, shareable, noteworthy content that people want to read. The blog is focused on product promotion rather than something to inspire the customer to write, plan, schedule, etc.
-
Thank you so much... Moz should have a 'great answer' button! Yes, I've been thinking this for a while now and I think this is a really good approach.
Do you have thoughts on why the 2017 page ranks SO poorly though (for that specific term)? The only rational I can think of is that Google has effectively 'chosen' our homepage over the LP. Have you come across anything similar in the past?
Thanks again, better get cracking!
Isaac.
-
I think that your homepage ranks well for "2017 Diaries" because your site is all about diaries. Your homepage is probably more powerful than your 2017 Diaries page and that is probably why the homepage ranks higher.
So, if this is the top query for bring you business, I would optimize the homepage for it, get relevant products on the homepage and go for it. Right now your homepage could be greatly improved for "2017 Diaries" because "2017 only appears twice in plain text at the bottom of the page and is not in the title tag. I wonder what your homepage could do if properly optimized for this term?
If I owned your site I would change the homepage optimization and content a few times per year to take advantage of a new year starting, back to school, summer fitness, etc. This would move my most powerful page from battle to battle at various times of the year. Perhaps you do this?
Also, if I owned the site I would have lots of articles about how various types of people use the products that you sell, historical information about famous people and their appointment, journaling, and diary habits. I'd be doing a little more cross-selling of writing implements on the diaries page. Just tossing these in based upon my experience in a similar niche.
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
-
Can 301 redirects that are inaccurate cause Google suppressions on rankings?
In an interesting study by DeganSEO titled 'Negative Impact of 301 Redirects - A Case Study' a drop of rankings was observed when popular blog posts were redirected to product pages. One hypothesis is that the suppression is due to topical difference between the redirected pages (blog posts) and the target page. The topical difference issue is an interesting one when you consider it in the context of website migrations. We always recommend that 301 redirects are done at a page level and that if an equivalent page doesn't exist to just 301 anyway but to the most logical page. If you think about it Google are likely to frown on this because a) it's not a good experience for the user - 404 would be more accurate for them
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QubaSEO
b) it's lazy - if you have good content that has gained authority/trust then create the same content on the new site don't trytp pass that to an entirely different page. Thoughts? Experiences?0 -
Same page Anchor Links vs Internal Link (Cannibalisation)
Hey Mozzers, I have a very long article page that supports several of my sub-category pages. It has sub-headings that link out to the relevant pages. However the article is very long and to make it easier to find the relevant section I was debating adding inpage anchor links in a bullet list at the top of the page for quick navigation. PAGE TITLE Keyword 1 Keyword 2 etc <a name="'Keyword1"></a> Keyword 1 Content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP
<a name="'Keyword2"></a> Keyword 2 Content Because of the way my predecessor wrote this article, its section headings are the same as the sub-categories they link out to and boost (not ideal but an issue I will address later). What I wondered is if having the inpage achor would confuse the SERPS because they would be linking with the same keyword. My worry is that by increasing userbility of the article by doing this I also confuse them SERPS First I tell them that this section on my page talk about keyword 1. Then from in that article i tell them that a different page entirely is about the same keyword. Would linking like this confuse SERPS or are inpage anchor links looked upon and dealt with differently?0 -
Can I tell Google to Ignore Parts of a Page?
Hi all, I was wondering if there was some sort of html trick that I could use to selectively tell a search engine to ignore texts on certain parts of a page. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charles_Murdock
Charles0 -
What referrer is shown in http request when google crawler visit a page?
Is it legit to show different content to http request having different referrer? case a: user view one page of the site with plenty of information about one brand, and click on a link on that page to see a product detail page of that brand, here I don't want to repeat information about the brand itself case b: a user view directly the product detail page clicking on a SERP result, in this case I would like to show him few paragraph about the brand Is it bad? Anyone have experience in doing it? My main concern is google crawler. Should not be considered cloaking because I am not differentiating on user-agent bot-no-bot. But when google is crawling the site which referrer will use? I have no idea, does anyone know? When going from one link to another on the website, is google crawler leaving the referrer empty?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | max.favilli0 -
How can I prevent duplicate pages being indexed because of load balancer (hosting)?
The site that I am optimising has a problem with duplicate pages being indexed as a result of the load balancer (which is required and set up by the hosting company). The load balancer passes the site through to 2 different URLs: www.domain.com www2.domain.com Some how, Google have indexed 2 of the same URLs (which I was obviously hoping they wouldn't) - the first on www and the second on www2. The hosting is a mirror image of each other (www and www2), meaning I can't upload a robots.txt to the root of www2.domain.com disallowing all. Also, I can't add a canonical script into the website header of www2.domain.com pointing the individual URLs through to www.domain.com etc. Any suggestions as to how I can resolve this issue would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
What are the ranking factors for "Google News"? How can we compete?
We have a few sport news websites that are picked up by Google News. Once in a blue moon, one of our articles ranks for a great keyword and shows in one of the 3 listings that Google News has in SERPS. Any tips on how we can we optimise more of our articles to compete in these 3 positions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | betnl0 -
Street Address Not Appearing on Business Google+ Page
I run a local business in New York City, a commercial real estate brokerage. My firm has both a web site and Google+ accounts, one Google+ account for me personally and a Google+ account for my business. Under address my Google+ account is showing New York, NY. It is not showing a street address. Similiarly when my business name is entered in the Google search bar, my web site is the first result, but under address (directly to the right of a black dot with a grey circle around it) "New York, NY" with the phone number beneath it appears. No sign of my street address. My business is registered under Google Places and we have entered the correct street address. Any ideas on how I can get Google to display our street address? This is obviously very, very detrimental for local SEO. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
My landing page changed in google's serp. I used to have a product page now I have a pdf?
I have been optimizing this page for a few weeks now and and have seen our page for up from 23rd to 11th on the serp's. I come to work today and not only have I dropped to 15 but I've also had my relevant product page replaced by this page . Not to mention the second page is a pdf! I am not sure what happened here but any advice on how I could fix this would be great. My site is www.mynaturalmarket.com and the keyword I'm working on is Zyflamend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenyonManu3-SEOSEM0