Pages Fighting Over Keywords
-
Hi Guys,
Just after some general advice. Since manipulation of keywords through links is no longer a feasible way of ranking these days, I was wondering how people got round the issue of pages bouncing for the same keyword or Google deciding that a blog post is a better signal rather than your service page.
For instance if you are doing local and national search, how do you stop the local keywords ranking for national pages, without diluting the local signals. I have some ideas:-
- stronger internal linking to the page
- review content
But obviously redirects or canonical won't be a good solution as I still want these pages to exist in their own right.
Regards
Neil
-
Hi Neil,
Thanks for your reply. So, the thing is, it's typically much, much harder to rank national pages (you're competing against the nation) than to rank local ones - if the searcher is local and the search is perceived to have a local intent, because these pages are only competing locally. So, another question from me:
Are the local pages ranking well for local searchers? As in, your office in Atlanta is telling you they see the Atlanta landing page come up instead of the national page? And your office in Dallas is telling you they see the Dallas page come up instead of the national page?
Or, are you saying, you have a searcher in San Francisco (where you have no office) seeing the Dallas page instead of the national page?
-
Hi Miriam,
Something link this scenario yes. Okay the client has a lot of local landing pages which are performing extremely well. However theire is also the searcher who will perform a search without a local modifier but the issue is the national pages aren’t ranking, Google seems to be picking local pages instead. It definitely is a content issue but I don’t want the local pages to lose momentum.
I am thinking:-
-
more internal linking from local pages to the national page.
-
review national content and see if it can be improved/extended.
Regards
Neil
-
-
Hey Neil,
I want to be sure I've envisioned your scenario clearly. Are you saying something along the lines of:
-
You have a national medical services brand, with 10 clinics on the west coast.
-
You have a permanent page on your website that deals with the topic of supporting family members with Alzheimer's.
-
You write a blog post on an Alzheimer's walk in San Mateo that your clinic in San Mateo is co-sponsoring and which gets a lot of shares and links, and suddenly, this local-focused blog post is outranking the permanent, non-local page on this disease when someone searches for "Alzheimer's support.". And you don't want this ... you want the permanent article to appear first when people look for this keyword phrase.
Is this what you are describing, or would you modify my hypothetical scenario in any way?
-
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
-
Why Dropping pages from SERPS?
Our website for my olansi company in London, China has hundreds of pages dedicated to every service we provide to China local areas. The total number of pages is approximately 100. Google caters pretty well for long-tail searches when it indexes all these pages, so we usually get a fair amount of traffic when this happens. However, Google occasionally drops most of our indexed pages from search engine results for a few days or weeks at a time - for example, Google is currently indexing 60 pages while last week it was back at 100. Can you tell me why this happens? When these pages don't display, we lose a lot of organic traffic. What are we doing wrong? Site url:https://www.olanside.com
Technical SEO | | sesahoda0 -
Thousands of 404-pages, duplicate content pages, temporary redirect
Hi, i take over the SEO of a quite large e-commerce-site. After checking crawl issues, there seems to be +3000 4xx client errors, +3000 duplicate content issues and +35000 temporary redirects. I'm quite desperate regarding these results. What would be the most effective way to handle that. It's a magento shop. I'm grateful for any kind of help! Thx,
Technical SEO | | posthumus
boris0 -
Page not cached
Hi there, we uploaded a page but unfortunately didn't realise it had noindex,nofollow in the meta tags. Google had cached it then decached it (i guess thats possible) it seems? now it will not cache even though the correct meta tags have been put in and we have sent links to it internally and externally. Anyone know why this page isn't being cached, the internal link to it is on the homepage and that gets cached almost every day. I even submitted it to webmaster tools to index.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
New EMD update effected my mom's legit author page? From page 1 in SERP to nowhere for her name
I think my mom's site, MargaretTerry.com was hit by this update for her name "Margaret Terry". Went from bouncing around the first page on google.com and .ca all the time to nowhere on the index. The results are now very strange, a mix of Youtube, linked in, and small book stores that she has done events at recently to promote her first book. I was checking after some of my SEO buddys were freaking out about their EMD's getting hit on Sunday. She is an aspiring author with a book coming out this month. There is obviously no ads or spam content on the site... I have never done SEO for it either except a bit of on page I guess. It sucks that people might be grabbing her book soon and when they Google her name nothing shows up. This couldn't have really happened at a worse time. Not to mention the hours spent building the site to her liking, free of charge of course 🙂 Is there anyone I can contact there to help me out? Shouldn't and EMD that is someones name still rank when you search their name?
Technical SEO | | Operatic0 -
Duplicating Keywords in Page Title
Hello All, I am currently trying to establish the TITLE tag of my homepage. I am trying to target 2 terms plus my company name. For example, purposes, the two keywords are: Widget Program Widget Software My company Name is: Widget Direct I originally had the title as: Widget Program | Software | Widget Direct My thought was that I didn't want to repeat the word "Widget" too many times. However, the SEOmoz on-page report card keeps telling me I should have the exact keyword in my title tag. In that case it would make the title: Widget Program | Widget Software | Widget Direct Do you think that is better so that I have each keyword in the title or will that result in a penalty because it looks like I'm stuffing the title with the keyword 'widget'? Any insight is greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Robert-B0 -
Keyword Canabalisation and my solution
Hi. According to one guy, in this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/good-seo-titles, the Meta Title, H1 Tag Title on the product page, and the category listing pages should be different to avoid keyword canabilisation. One problem I noticed in my website after reading about this topic, is that all my printers have the keyword sentence :"refurbished printer", yes 99% of the products are refurbished but in that way according to the answer in the above post I am competing against self, too many pages (1000) with the same keywords on it. So I decided to make some changes and I I would like to know the opinion of the experts here, I did this only for one product, then I would of course need to this for lots of products. 1. I created a different meta title. check here please http://www.theprinterdepo.com/hp-color-laserjet-cp2025n-printer-new 2. In the product page itself, I removed the condition from the name of the product, instead I put the template, NAME - MODEL -CONDITION. 3. In the category listing page I havent made any change yet, it still shows the product name only http://www.theprinterdepo.com/new-printers/color-laser-new-printers Check 1st row, 4th column. Is this a good approach?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Ads at the top of the page
hi mozzers, I have a website made in dreamweaver. Right at the very top of all of my pages is a text advert with a link to an affiliate in the ad. This link is very lucrative and gets a lot of sales, but i'm concerned it may have some negatives from an SEO perspective. As it's the first text on every page, i'm guessing bots will read it first. Could this potentially cause problems? If so, is there a best practice that would allow me to keep it there and keep the bots happy? Cheers, Peter
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
Page that has no link is being crawled
http://www.povada.com/category/filters/metal:Silver/nstart/1/start/1.htm I have no idea how the above page was even found by google but it seems that it is being crawled and Im not sure where its being found from. Can anyone offer a solution?
Technical SEO | | 13375auc30