Page disappears from search results when Google geographic location is close to offline physical location
-
If you use Google to search georgefox.edu for "doctor of business administration", the first search result is http://www.georgefox.edu/business/dba/ - I'll refer to this page as the DBA homepage from here on. The second page is http://www.georgefox.edu/offices/sfs/grad/tuition/business/dba/ - I'll refer to this page as the DBA program costs page from here on.
Search: https://www.google.com/search?q=doctor+of+business+administration+site%3Ageorgefox.edu
This appears to hold true no matter what your geographic location is set to on Google.
George Fox University is located in Newberg, Oregon. If you search for "doctor of business administration" with your geographic location set to a location beyond a certain distance away from Newberg, Oregon, the first georgefox.edu result is the DBA homepage.
Set your location on Google to Redmond, Oregon
Search: https://www.google.com/search?q=doctor+of+business+administrationBut, if you set your location a little closer to home, the DBA homepage disappears from the top 50 search results on Google.
Set your location on Google to Newberg, Oregon
Search: https://www.google.com/search?q=doctor+of+business+administrationNow the first georgefox.edu page to appear in the search results is the DBA program costs page.
Here are the locations I have tested so far:
First georgefox.edu search result is the DBA homepage
- Redmond, OR
- Eugene, OR
- Boise, ID
- New York, NY
- Seattle, WA
First georgefox.edu search result is the DBA program costs page
- Newberg, OR
- Portland, OR
- Salem, OR
- Gresham, OR
- Corvallis, OR
It appears that if your location is set to within a certain distance of Newberg, OR, the DBA homepage is being pushed out of the search results for some reason.
Can anyone verify these results? Does anyone have any idea why this is happening?
-
Hi RCF,
Here is what I see:
Searching for 'doctor of business administration' with my location set to Redmond Oregon, http://www.georgefox.edu/business/dba/ is coming up #8 organically.
Doing this same search, but with my location set to Newberg, Oregon, I see http://www.georgefox.edu/offices/sfs/grad/tuition/business/dba/ coming up #2 organically.
It looks like my exact rankings may not be identical to yours, but at least my searches appear to confirm that the 2 different pages are surfacing with the 2 different locations being set.
Unfortunately, I agree with Moosa that it's very hard to hit on a precise reason for why Google would be favoring your tuition page over your home page when a user's location is set to the town the in which the institution is located. I do have a suggestion, though. Why not try putting Newberg, OR in the title tag of the page you'd like to be ranking highest for Newberg-located searchers, mention it in the H1 tag, and mention it more than once in the copy. I'd also recommend that you put the complete NAP (name, address, phone) in the body copy of the page, though I see it's already in the footer. Perhaps by increasing the optimization for Newberg on this page, you might strengthen the pages chances of ranking the way you want it to? Just a suggestions.
-
Yes, that's the only vaguely plausible explanation we've come up with too, though it's not very satisfying and it's impossible to prove.
Thanks for the suggestion, Moosa!
-
I believe no one can answer exactly what it is but one can only answer as per the experiments and what has happened to one in the past!
Google recently said that they will drop down your rankings if people are going to click on your website and bounce back within few seconds and select another result. If we keep this rule for local results that would be like if people from certain location find the page irrelevant, Google will probably rank it down and the same page if responding well for another location Google will rank it higher on that location.
I can be completely wrong but this is one of the thousand possibilities
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
-
How many times will Google read a page?
Hello! Do you know if Google reads a page more than once? We want to include a very robust menu that has a lot of links, so we were thinking about coding a very simple page that loads first and immediately loading the other code that has all the links thinking that perhaps Google will only read the first version but won't read it the second time with all the links. Do you know if we will get penalized? I'm not sure if I got the idea across, let me know if I need to expand more. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alinaalvarez0 -
ECommerce search results to noindex?
Hi, To avoid duplicated content and the possibility of thousands additional pages to an ecommerce website would it be a reasonable solution to have the page as a no-index, would this benefit the site? Thanks **Lantec **
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lantec0 -
Home Page or Internal Page
I have a website that deals with personalized jewelry, and our main keyword is "Name Necklace".
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm
3 mounth ago i added new page: http://www.onecklace.com/name-necklaces/ And from then google index only this page for my main keyword, and not our home page.
Beacuase the page is new, and we didn't have a lot of link to it, our rank is not so well. I'm considering to remove this page (301 to home page), beacause i think that if google index our home page for this keyword it will be better. I'm not sure if this is a good idea, but i know that our home page have a lot of good links and maybe our rank will be higher. Another thing, because google index this internal page for this keyword, it looks like our home page have no main keyword at all. BTW, before i add this page, google index our main page with this keyword. Please advise... U5S8gyS.png j50XHl4.png0 -
No Results for Google/Bing Keyword Search by Domain Name
My site is bestwebconsult [dot] com When I do a search for my exact domain name in Google and bing, it does not appear at all. I have submitted a sitemap to Webmaster Tools. It is a relatively new site completed with in the last month. Built with Joomla. This leads me to believe that something is misconfigured on the website. Please advise, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crave811 -
Does Google crawl and spider for other links in rel=canonical pages?
When you add rel=canonical to the page, will Google still crawl your page for content and discover new links in that page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReferralCandy0 -
Why will google not index my pages?
About 6 weeks ago we moved a subcategory out to becomne a main category using all the same content. We also removed 100's of old products and replaced these with new variation listings to remove duplicate content issues. The problem is google will not index 12 critcal pages and our ranking have slumped for the keywords in the categories. What can i do to entice google to index these pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Can you appear in both Google local and universal results on the page?
I have a client that ranks 2nd for a google local result, and the local results are the first set of results being displayed, making it in fact the 2nd result on the page for the keyword. There aren't any blended results on this page, it's straightforward local results, then universal results directly after. They are concerned that they are not appearing in the universal results high enough (they're on page 5 with a different url than the homepage). I'm not sure why their #2 local ranking isn't good enough since those are consistently the same results, but I have to ask; Can you appear in both local and universal results on the same page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Removing a Page From Google index
We accidentally generated some pages on our site that ended up getting indexed by google. We have corrected the issue on the site and we 404 all of those pages. Should we manually delete the extra pages from Google's index or should we just let Google figure out that they are 404'd? What the best practice here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0