Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why does Google pick a low priority page on my site?
-
Hi Guys.
One of my pages ranks quite well for "mid year diaries 14-15" on Google. The problem is it's a really specific product page (A4, Hardback, day-to-a-page diary I think).
It would be much better for the user to land on our mid-year diaries category, not really deep into the site. Why is Google prioritizing this product page over our general 'mid year diaries' category?
Especially when the category would relate to the search more accurately?
I work for TOAD diaries and I think our page rank is 10 for this search.
Eagerly awaiting some insight
Thanks in advance everyone!
Isaac.
-
Hi Issac,
Keyword cannibalisation is pretty much exactly that. This is why it is important for pages to be as unique as possible.
The two below are sort of a similar thing, except the first one refers to linking to your key pages from a product page by way of a short sentence that has a link with some nice on-topic anchor text leading off.
- On your product pages, have a text link back to the key page that isn't the crumb-trail. You can also do this from other pages closer to the homepage
- Internal Links to your key pages
-Andy
-
Hi Andy! Thankyou sooooooo much! I'm kinda new to this. I worked for them for while as a product guy. I realised the SEO was lacking and so I've sorta stepped into that role.
Makes a lot of sense, I will defiantly be implementing some changes.
Not sure what you meant by links that aren't the 'crumb trail'. And also what did you mean by keyword cannibalisation? Is that just having more than one page that you try to optimise for the same keywords?
Again thankyou so much.
Isaac.
-
Hi Issac,
In these circumstances, there are a few things to look at.
- Internal Links to your key pages
- External links to key pages
- Add some unique content to these pages. There is no content currently on them http://www.toaddiaries.co.uk/shop/custom-diaries/mid-year-diaries-14-15
- On your product pages, have a text link back to the key page that isn't the crumb-trail. You can also do this from other pages closer to the homepage
- Make sure there is no keyword cannibalisation going on that could cause Google to choose one page over another
- There is no rel=canonical on any of the pages. Add these so that they self canonicalise
- Check to see if your key pages are indexed by Google. This often goes unnoticed and can have you chasing your tail
See how you get on with those. There are other lesser possibilities, but these should give you some good starting points.
-Andy
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
-
The particular page cannot be indexed by Google
Hello, Smart People!
On-Page Optimization | | Viktoriia1805
We need help solving the problem with Google indexing.
All pages of our website are crawled and indexed. All pages, including those mentioned, meet Google requirements and can be indexed. However, only this page is still not indexed.
Robots.txt is not blocking it.
We do not have a tag "nofollow"
We have it in the sitemap file.
We have internal links for this page from indexed pages.
We requested indexing many times, and it is still grey.
The page was established one year ago.
We are open to any suggestions or guidance you may have. What else can we do to expedite the indexing process?1 -
site speed
i use mid-quality pic and... but my site speed is low
On-Page Optimization | | zlbvasgabc
any suggestion?
my site is:
https://bandolini.ir/0 -
Do you need to include the top menu on every single page of the site in the code?
When using cache: on google, and clicking on Text-only version, our site has the top menu gibberish on top? My feeling is that this take away SEO juice from our title and focus keyword. Our website is culinarydepotinc.com
On-Page Optimization | | Sammyh1 -
Should we rename and update a page or create a new page entirely?
Hi Moz Peoples! We have a small site with a simple site navigation, with only a few links on the nav bar. We have been doing some work to create a new page, which will eventually replace one of the links on the nav bar. The question we are having is, is it better to rename the existing page and replace its content and then wait for the great indexer to do its thing, or perm delete the page and replace it with the new page and content? Or is this a case where it really makes no difference as long as the redirects are set up correctly?
On-Page Optimization | | Parker8180 -
Prevent link juice to flow on low-value pages
Hello there! Most of the websites have links to low-value pages in their main navigation (header or footer)... thus, available through every other pages. I especially think about "Conditions of Use" or "Privacy Notice" pages, which have no value for SEO. What I would like, is to prevent link juice to flow into those pages... but still keep the links for visitors. What is the best way to achieve this? Put a rel="nofollow" attribute on those links? Put a "robots" meta tag containing "noindex,nofollow" on those pages? Put a "Disallow" for those pages in a "robots.txt" file? Use efficient Javascript links? (that crawlers won't be able to follow)
On-Page Optimization | | jonigunneweg0 -
Page speed tools
Working on reducing page load time, since that is one of the ranking factors that Google uses. I've been using Page Speed FireFox plugin (requires FireBug), which is free. Pretty happy with it but wondering if others have pointers to good tools for this task. Thanks...
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0 -
Would it be bad to change the canonical URL to the most recent page that has duplicate content, or should we just 301 redirect to the new page?
Is it bad to change the canonical URL in the tag, meaning does it lose it's stats? If we add a new page that may have duplicate content, but we want that page to be indexed over the older pages, should we just change the canonical page or redirect from the original canonical page? Thanks so much! -Amy
On-Page Optimization | | MeghanPrudencio0 -
Avoiding "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" - Best Practices?
We have a website with a searchable database of recipes. You can search the database using an online form with dropdown options for: Course (starter, main, salad, etc)
On-Page Optimization | | smaavie
Cooking Method (fry, bake, boil, steam, etc)
Preparation Time (Under 30 min, 30min to 1 hour, Over 1 hour) Here are some examples of how URLs may look when searching for a recipe: find-a-recipe.php?course=starter
find-a-recipe.php?course=main&preperation-time=30min+to+1+hour
find-a-recipe.php?cooking-method=fry&preperation-time=over+1+hour There is also pagination of search results, so the URL could also have the variable "start", e.g. find-a-recipe.php?course=salad&start=30 There can be any combination of these variables, meaning there are hundreds of possible search results URL variations. This all works well on the site, however it gives multiple "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" errors when crawled by SEOmoz. I've seached online and found several possible solutions for this, such as: Setting canonical tag Adding these URL variables to Google Webmasters to tell Google to ignore them Change the Title tag in the head dynamically based on what URL variables are present However I am not sure which of these would be best. As far as I can tell the canonical tag should be used when you have the same page available at two seperate URLs, but this isn't the case here as the search results are always different. Adding these URL variables to Google webmasters won't fix the problem in other search engines, and will presumably continue to get these errors in our SEOmoz crawl reports. Changing the title tag each time can lead to very long title tags, and it doesn't address the problem of duplicate page content. I had hoped there would be a standard solution for problems like this, as I imagine others will have come across this before, but I cannot find the ideal solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Kind Regards5