Lower Level Pages Being Ranked for Key Terms
-
Good Afternoon
We've been having problems with a site for a little while now. It had a penalty (partial link) a few years ago and never really recovered back to it's full potential despite the fact that the penalty was eventually removed and we've since changed the domain completely as well as moving over to https and left behind / disavowed bad links.
In the Moz ranking stats now, I'm seeing that some of our lower level pages are ranking for core terms and the erratic nature of the ranking graph seems to indicate that Google is confused and not knowing what page to pull. For example, the top level page would be Hotel in Spain but the page that is ranking for that term is one of the individual hotel information (lower level) pages lets say the Holiday Inn .
The lower level page has info on the individual property but also makes reference to it being a "Cheap Hotel In Spain"
My suggestion to resolve the problem is to scale back the references to the top level terms on the hotel pages and reintroduce breadcrumb links to help Google follow the structure of the site again
Does this sound reasonable or would anyone be able to suggest anything else to try?
-
Thanks very much for your reply
I think in the past we had scaled back on our exact match anchor text in the internal links based on advice from an Seo agency we had worked.
Whereas before we would have had a list of links in a box on the homepage to our most popular options saying for instance Hotel in Spain, Hotel in Gibraltar etc. This was changed to have the heading of the box as Hotels and the link anchor texts changed to the location Spain, Gibraltar
So I'm guessing the agency overreacted to the issue of exact match anchor text for external links and didn't need to apply it to the internal structure
-
Howdy.
What you need to do is look into internal links structure with what anchor texts are used. And using that to strengthen internal "rankings" of pages. Also look into external links and what pages and anchor texts are used there. Increase the flow to higher level pages, they will outrank the lower level pages.
Hope this 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
-
Is there a way to index important pages manually or to make sure a certain page will get indexed in a short period of time??
Hi There! The problem I'm having is that certain pages are waiting already three months to be indexed. They even have several backlinks. Is it normal to have to wait more than three months before these pages get an indexation? Is there anything i can do to make sure these page will get an indexation soon? Greetings Bob
Technical SEO | | rijwielcashencarry0400 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Changing the order of items on page against Google Terms & Conditions?
Good day, I am wondering if anybody here has done something like this before. I have a page in one of my sites that contains a number of different - but related - free resources. The resources can be sorted in different ways once the user is on the page. Now I am starting an outreach campaign, and want to be able to send out custom URLS (which pretty much means they have different query strings after them like '?id=123' ) so that when a person clicks on the link to the page it brings up the stuff they are more likely to be interested in at the top. I expect - hope - that some of these people will put links back to this page as a result of this. Now all the links may be slightly different, but they will come to the same page and the content will look slightly different. I will make sure to have the rel=canonical tag in place. Does anybody know if this would be in violation of Google Terms and Conditions. I can't see how, but I wanted to see what the experts here on Moz think before moving forward. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Why do they rank the home page?
We are trying to rank for the key word Motorcycle Parts. We have moved up to page 2 over the past couple months; however, google is ranking our home page not our http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/s/49/61/Motorcycle-Parts page that is for motorcycle parts. We are working on internal linking to help point the right signals too. Any other thoughts? ( we have new content written to put in as well we just have to wait for an issue to be fixed before we can put it in)
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Page crawling is only seeing a portion of the pages. Any Advice?
last couple of page crawls have returned 14 out of 35 pages. Is there any suggestions I can take.
Technical SEO | | cubetech0 -
Can leaving up old web pages no longer accessible through my site navigation hurt my rankings?
My firm recently overhauled a client's website. As part of the project, we gave the content a new structure, eliminating certain pages and creating several new ones. However, I just found out that some of the "old" pages (the ones we supposedly eliminated) still appear in the Google SERPs. Somehow, the client - who handled the coding - let these pages remain live even though they can no longer be accessed through the site navigation. This seems like something that could hurt the client's SEO rankings, but I want to make sure before contacting the client and suggesting they take down the old pages. Can anyone confirm my suspicion?
Technical SEO | | matt-145670 -
Removing pages from website
Hello all, I am fairly new to the SEOmoz community. But i am working for a company which organizes exhibitons, events and training in Holland. A lot of these events are only given ones ore twice and then we do not organise them any more because they are no longer relevant. Every event has its own few webpages which provide information about the event and are being indexed by Google. In the past we did not remove any of these events. I was looking in the CMS and saw a lot of events of 2008 and older which are being indexed. To clean the website and the CMS i am thinking of removing these pages of old events. The risk is that these pages have some links to them and are getting some traffic, so if i remove them there is a risk of losing traffic and rankings. What would be the wise thing to do? Make a folder with archive or something? Regards, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
Can someone break down 'page level link metrics' for me?
Sorry for the, again, basic question - can someone define page level link metrics for me?
Technical SEO | | Benj250