Destination URL in SERPs keeps changing and I can't work out why.. Help.
-
I am befuddled as to why our destination URL in SERPs keeps changing
oak furniture was nicely returning
http://www.thefurnituremarket.co.uk/oakfurniture.asp
then I changed something yesterday I did 2 things.
-
published a link to that on facebook as part of a competition.
-
redirected dynamic pages to the static URL for oak furniture..
Now for oak furniture the SERPs in GG UK is returning our home page as the most relevant landing page..
Any Idea why?
I'm leaning to an onpage issue than posting on FB..
Thoughts?
-
-
I'm at the same point with an ecommerce. I targeted a select amount of keywords too hard at the start. Now I'm looking at the past years ecommerce conversion keywords and fine tuning all my product pages to better rank them.
-
I originally turned them into image links because we were getting reports of link canibalisation and whilst our new static link pages bedded in and started building their own link profiles I felt it best to put a stop to this.
In other words I still wanted to the homepage to rank whilst the sub pages authority increased. I think we are at a point now where we flip back to text links.
-
You can also redo your navigation menus in text/css styles as well.
-
Agreed. It's even the very first keyword phrase:
<title>Oak Furniture | French Furniture | Mirrored Furniture | Coffee Tabletitle>
-
our oakfurniture.asp page is around 6 months old now and has been indexing for "oak furniture " for the last 3...
now
we only have a fraction of the oak furniture content on our home page. thats on our oak furniture.asp page.
We did have a dynamic catergory page that I did a 301 yesterday to point the static page with the theory it would bolster its internal linking profile.
also I did this because I dont think our CMS cat page was very visually appealing and there was way too much content below the fold.
we do suffer a lot with pagination due to the dynamic URLs we have with this CMS.. on the whole the onpage improvements I have implemented has lead to pleasing amounts of pages being indexed.So I figure google can work around our onpage limitations thanks to webmaster tools etc and index our content.
Our on page is far from perfect though. I have been link building towards a number of inner pages and this page in particular being our flag ship.
I havent done anything silly with it as far am I am aware I just do link building as and when I have time.
Does this clarify anything?
-
and take "oak furniture" out of your homepage heading and meta description
-
You have changed something and now google is responding - they often test different landing pages. I find this a lot with newly launched sites, Google will run through a number of possible landing pages for queries over a few weeks before it settles on one
To get it to pick the one you want:
- Work hard to build links to the page you want, internal and external
- Try eliminate duplicate content - not exact duplicate content, but content that talks about the same thing - I mostly do 1 keyword for 1 page and make sure that no other page cannibalizes its keyword
- build out your oak furniture page - make it substantially more about oak furniture than any other page on your site
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 you help by advising how to stop a URL from referring to another URL on my website with a 404 errorplease?
How to stop a URL from referring to another URL on my site. I'm getting a 404 error on a referred URL which is (https://webwritinglab.com/know-exactly-what-your-ideal-clients-want-in-8-easy-steps/[null id=43484])referred from URL (https://webwritinglab.com/know-exactly-what-your-ideal-clients-want-in-8-easy-steps/) The referred URL is the URL page that I want and I do not need it redirecting to the other URL as that's presenting a 404 error. I have tried saving the permalink in WordPress and recreated the .htaccess file and the problem is still there. Can you advise how to fix this please? Is it a case of removing the redirect? Is this advisable and how do I do that please? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Nichole.wynter20200 -
How to deal with URLs when changing shopping cart software to ensure SEO
NSFW ALERT (LINK BELOW) We are changing the shopping section of our website. Currently the products sit on our own website and when a user goes to checkout they are taken to Mals (a shopping cart site). This means our URL’s look like this. NSFWhttps://www.aprilnites.com.au/mascara_vibe.htmlThe new software is Ecwid and we are using this with a site created in RapidWeaver so the URLs will not be clean and will have all ? And # parameters. I’m wondering if this will hurt the SEO of our whole site or just the product pages. I’m also unsure of how best to deal with the current URLs. Should I use a 301 redirect on all of them to take the user back to the home page of the shop. For us the shop is more of a catalogue. Our main website is the most important part but I want to make sure we are following best practice when making this change. Hope someone can help.Many thanks
Technical SEO | | AprilN0 -
Having issues with Redirects not working and old links on SERP
We just migrated a site and built a redirect map for Site A to B. If there were old redirects made for site A that weren't pulled when pulling internal links for site A, do those also need to be redirected to site B to eliminate a Redirect chain? Cannot figure out why old links are still showing up, does it take a few days for google to figure out these are not real pages?
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Collide0 -
Changing Urls
Hi All, I have a question I hope someone can help me with. I ran a scan on a website and it has a stack of urls that are far too long. I am going through and changing the urls to shorter ones. But my question is regarding redirections. Wordpress seems to be automatically redirecting the old urls to the new ones, should i be adding a more solid 301 in as well or is the wordpress redirect enough? I ask as they dont all seem to stay redirecting Thanks in advance for the help
Technical SEO | | DaleZon2 -
Duplicate title tags being caused by upper case and lower case version of urls'
Hi GWT is reporting lots of duplicate titles for a clients new site. Mainly these are due to 2x different versions of the url, one with words starting with an upper case character and the other all lower case. Clients dev saying this has something to do with windows server and is ok! Is this correct or should i be telling them to delete and then 301 redirect all upper case versions to the lower case (since lower case better practice) and that will deal with the reported dupe titles ? All Best Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Open Site Explorer doesn't update correctly
We have been using OSE for a little over 2 Months now and our link demographics haven't changed although we have been getting lots of backlinks from other blogs and webpages. Google Webmaster Tools displays these links but OSE, even after the updates, doesn't.
Technical SEO | | wellbo
Our domain is about 1 Year old and has had indexed content on it since June this year. Google Webmaster Tools shows 24 Links to our domain but OSE only 3. The domain is http://www.wellbo.de0 -
Website isn't Ranking for Any Keyword
Hi, I launched a playhouses website in april this year and have been steadily link building to it over the past few months. I have gotten all of the internal optimisation correct (that I can see) however it is still not ranking for any keyword and suprinsgly all of our traffic is comming either direct or through bing. The website is showing as being in googles index however it is still not ranking for even the smallest of niche keywords. The only penalty I can see is that we have some spammy blog links that my colleague has gotten which I have been trying to counteract with high quality guest blogging. Any input is welcome the url is http://www.playhouses.co.uk/ Simon
Technical SEO | | GardenGamer0 -
Hosted in the Cloud, my URL is a .com how can I rank in UK SERPS?
Hi Mozzers, I have found an e-commerce SAS solution (USA based) that hosts its platform in the Cloud. Unfortunately my domain is a ,com but I wish to rank & sell within the UK. I realise I can select the UK parameters within GWT, but I am led to believe that this isnt hugely effective. Other than choosing another eCommerce platform, could anyone please assist me in identifying a solution? Thank you in advance.
Technical SEO | | eppleston0