Wrong page ranked in Google, specific example
-
Hi All,
I've searched for previous questions and many talk about the same problem but do not post an actual example. I am also thinking to do a blog post and a series of experiments once there is a theory.
My target keyword is "Exhibition Stand Hire" and this is the target page on our site http://goo.gl/qt54lb
Site appears on page 6 of SERPS (google.co.uk), but instead of this page a homepage is listed.
But if I'm searching for the term using quotes, ie "Exhibition Stand Hire" the right page appears on page 4 of the SERPs.
Our home page only uses the keyword in the body text, while target page is very optimised. Could it be over-optimised? I've tried mixing up words in the title tag to not offer an exact match, also i've varied the anchor text of all incoming links but that didn't fix the problem. (Hence why at the moment they all use different terms to point to this page) None of this helped alter what page is chosen to appear.
Is it simply the matter of page not being strong enough compared to other less relevant pages on the site? How come many other sites rank better with much less effort? (i'm using OSE to determine competition)
Thank you.
-
Thanks for your answer Jane. The competition is a mix of some sites being very small and more targeted then us, and some less strong domains doing better. I guess this highlights the importance of not having too many narrow pages which end up being weak.
Before the homepage started to rank, there was another wrong page ranking in a similar way until i removed the wording from it also, in the effort to make the correct page show, but looks like google just goes up to the next strong candidate.
-
Hi George,
My first thought would be that the internal page doesn't have enough authority - from what I can see from OSE, it has no links from third party sources, only internal links: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.exhibithire.co.uk%2Fexhibition-services%2Fexhibition-stand-hire%2F&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=&target=page&group=1
This isn't to say that some sites rank internal pages that have no third party inbound links, but they're generally very strong domains to begin with, e.g. a site like Debenhams having an internal page about (say) pink swimsuits ranking for [pink swimsuits]. I made this example up, checked, and indeed Debenhams does rank for that query, and the page has no inbound third party links. But it's on debenhams.com, and that's the "trick".
What does your competition look like? The domain itself only has a 29/100 domain authority, which can be fine in an uncrowded market but might not be enough for internal links to extent much authority to the desired page. Your home page is also pretty darn relevant to the original query: the site itself is about exhibition hiring, and you mention "stand" once on the home page where that text does not link elsewhere. I would say that the combination of the home page being very relevant for the query and the internal page not having high enough authority are causing this to happen.
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
-
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Hello, We have magento 2 extensions website mageants.com since 1 years google every 15 days cached my all pages but suddenly last 15 days my websites pages not cached by google showing me 404 error so go search console check error but din't find any error so I have cached manually fetch and render but still most of pages have same 404 error example page : - https://www.mageants.com/free-gift-for-magento-2.html error :- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&rlz=1C1CHBD_enIN803IN804&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1569j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 so have any one solutions for this issues
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore0 -
See Different Landing page for my main keyword in google search result
I have a website like http://www.bannerbuzz.com, i am promoting home page with vinyl banners keyword, but currently i can see my website's review page for vinyl banners result in google, i want to display my home page instead of review page for my keyword result in google, its frequently change, some time i can see home page for it and some time it shows review page as i attached image. i want to show my home page, so can you please help me to solve it, how can i stable my home page with main keywords. OtOXxiE.png
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Page Indexing increase when I request Google Site Link demote
Hi there, Has anyone seen a page crawling increase in Google Web Master Tools when they have requested a site link demotion? I did this around the 23rd of March, the next day I started to see page crawling rise and rise and report a very visible spike in activity and to this day is still relatively high. From memory I have asked about this in SEOMOZ Q&A a couple of years ago in and was told that page crawl activity is a good thing - ok fine, no argument. However at the nearly in the same period I have noticed that my primary keyword rank for my home page has dropped away to something in the region of 4th page on Google US and since March has stayed there. However the exact same query in Google UK (Using SEOMOZ Rank Checker for this) has remained the same position (around 11th) - it has barely moved. I decided to request an undemote on GWT for this page link and the page crawl started to drop but not to the level before March 23rd. However the rank situation for this keyword term has not changed, the content on our website has not changed but something has come adrift with our US ranks. Using Open Site Explorer not one competitor listed has a higher domain authority than our site, page authority, domain links you name it but they sit there in first page. Sorry the above is a little bit of frustration, this question is not impulsive I have sat for weeks analyzing causes and effects but cannot see why this disparity is happening between the 2 country ranks when it has never happened for this length of time before. Ironically we are still number one in the United States for a keyword phrase which I moved away from over a month ago and do not refer to this phrase at all on our index page!! Bizarre. Granted, site link demotion may have no correlation to the KW ranking impact but looking at activities carried out on the site and timing of the page crawling. This is the only sizable factor I can identify that could be the cause. Oh! and the SEOMOZ 'On-Page Optimization Tool' reports that the home page gets an 'A' for this KW term. I have however this week commented out the canonical tag for the moment in the index page header to see if this has any effect. Why? Because as this was another (if not minor) change I employed to get the site to an 'A' credit with the tool. Any ideas, help appreciated as to what could be causing the rank differences. One final note the North American ranks initially were high, circa 11-12th but then consequently dropped away to 4th page but not the UK rankings, they witnessed no impact. Sorry one final thing, the rank in the US is my statistical outlier, using Google Analytics I have an average rank position of about 3 across all countries where our company appears for this term. Include the US and it pushes the average to 8/9th. Thanks David
Technical SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
Mysterious drop of website ranking in google
Usually, I don't want to bother anybody by posting silly questions on forums. But this time I really might need advice. My wife and I took over the website maintenance and e-marketing of a local air conditioning company end of March this year. Before that the applied SEO strategies were not very user friendly and a little too search engine focused (spammy keyword stuffed articles, confusing website structure, a lot of directory links). Yesterday night (May 15th) the website more or less stopped ranking. For search terms like "ac repair englewood fl" or "trane north port" and many more the website was on page 1. Here are some more details: I replaced the old website with a newer version end of April. Since some of old the url structure did not apply any longer, I did a setup of around 30 301-redirects in .htaccess. The new site seemed to rank more or less as expected. The homepage has a PakeRank of 1 (seomoz Page Authority is 31). I am working on that but good natural links just take some time. site:kobiecomplete.com still brings up all the pages Google Webmaster Tools notified me on May 12th that there was a possible outage: _"_While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2012-05-08 16:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors:" The listed pages under "some sample pages" are only pages from the old website which do not exist any longer and the 301 redirect was not setup. But this should have been already any issue before, if at all.
Technical SEO | | grojoh
I added the missing 301 redirects and marked them as fixed in Google Webmaster Tools. I had a copy of the website on a testing webspace (root directory of brightsidewg.com). Even though I had robots.txt set to disallow everything and WordPress search engine privacy set to do not index / follow, the website appeared on the Google search results yesterday night instead of the original website (kobiecomplete.com). Even though brightsidewg was a few ranks worse than kobiecomplete.com was, it was still ranking.
To remove the duplicate content, I deleted everything on brightsidewg.com and requested the removal of the website in the Webmaster Tools. Now brightsidewg.com is not any longer indexed (good) but it didn't help the ranking of kobiecomplete.com. Especially the homepage and the service area pages were ranking pretty decent on Google before yesterday night. Now I can not find them at all. Only other less important pages rank on page 8+ No malware on website I did not do any big changes on the website yesterday (only really minor ones). I did not acquire any weird/paid links even though there is a new link from a PageRank 0 website which I did not setup: http://www.indo-karya.com/detail/news/2012/kombise But that alone I think would not be enough for a penalty. It almost looks like that Google applied a partial -950 filter!? I could submit the website for reconsideration to Google and tell them about the duplicate content issue with my testing webspace brightsidewg.com. What do you think about it and what shall I do? Thank you so much for any help!0 -
Google rankings dropped dramatically after 24 hrs of hosting suspension
Hi, One of my websites ( http://www.traveldestinationsearch.com/ ) dropped most of its Google rankings after 24 hours of hosting suspension (from April 26 until April 27, 2012). The hosting company suspended my website after exceeding the bandwidth limit: there was no unusual activity on my website, it just exceeded its bandwidth limit by 20-30MB for the previous month. Anyway, the website is back online since April 27 but the problem is that, following these 24 hrs of no service, I see a dramatic decrease of my website's Google rankings for its main keywords. Even today, April 29, I can't find my website anywhere in the first 100 results for most of its targeted keywords. Before the suspension, the website ranked #1 for its main keyword and somewhere in the first 2-3 pages of Google search results for other two main keywords. My question is: is it the hosting suspension the reason for the Google ranking drop, and (assuming this is a temporary problem) when do you think I should expect my website to regain the rankings it had before the hosting suspension? Thanks for your support. Regards, Adrian
Technical SEO | | AdrianBanu0 -
Help: Google Time Spent Downloading a Page, My Site is Slow
All, My site: http://www.nationalbankruptcyforum.com shows an average time spent downloading a page of 1,489 (in milliseconds) We've had spikes of well over 3,000 and lows of around 980 (all according to WMT). I understand that this is really slow. Does anyone have some suggestions as to how I could improve load times? Constructive criticism welcomed and encouraged.
Technical SEO | | JSOC0 -
What pages of my site does Google rank as the most important?
If I type site:youtube.com into Google, are the results listed by what Google considers to be the most important pages of the site? If I change my sitemap should this order change? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Seaward-Group0 -
Wrong Title Tag & No Meta Description showing up in Google SERP's
I'd like to know what I can do to get the correct title tag + meta description that I have on the page for www.myescondidomovers.com/ to actually show up in the SERP's on Google? It's currently just showing my main keyword and the domain name, nothing else. See attached and thanks in advance for you help. Much appreciated. SERPS.png
Technical SEO | | afranklin0