Help! The website ranks fine but one of my web pages simply won't rank on Google!!!

[CayenneRed89]

One of our web pages will not rank on Google.  The website as a whole ranks fine except just one section...We have tested and it looks fine...Google can crawl the page no problem.   There are no spurious redirects in place. The content is fine.  There is no duplicate page content issue.  The page has a dozen product images (photos) but the load time of the page is absolutely fine.  We have the submitted the page via webmaster and its fine.  It gets listed but then a few hours later disappears!!!  The site has not been penalised as we get good rankings with other pages.  Can anyone help?  Know about this problem?

[RuthBurrReedy]

Don't forget that every keyword is different - how you rank depends on what you're doing compared to other sites targeting that term, not just what you're doing on your own site. So some keywords just take a larger, higher-authority link profile to rank for than others. A good place to start with getting links for that page would be to look at the backlinks that other pages that rank for that term have - you may be able to get some links from the same or similar sites.

[CayenneRed89]

Thanks again!!!  We have just implemented a site footer with keyword targeting the relevant pages.  I thought this alone - along with the top navigation, copy (which is 265 words...) would give google enough guidance.  But its not!! External links we have just started to do - but I admit - really just started. I was trying in desperation to get the pages right first  Do you think more link would help?   We will try adding more copy...... The weird thing is - other pages on the site rank fine - including the homepage for the right keywords!!!

[RuthBurrReedy]

Ah OK, thanks for the clarification!

That problem, to me, sounds like you need some links! In general when Google is ranking your home page for a term, instead of the page that is actually about that term, it's because they recognize that your site has some topical relevance for that term, but the individual page doesn't seem that important based on how many links are pointing to it. Are there ways you can flow some additional internal link juice to that page? Are there sites that are linking to your home page right now that are very closely related to the topic of the page in question, that you could ask to point to that page instead? Are there topically-related sites that don't link to that page right now that you could possibly get a link from? All of these will beef up your page authority, which should help.

In terms of your copy being too far down on the page - if you don't think it will negatively impact your user experience, you could try moving it up, or integrating it into the section with the images, but I don't know how much that will help. You also may need more copy on the page - if your page is 300 lines of code long, and only 5 of those lines are unique copy, it's hard to send a strong enough signal of relevance. Can you expand what you say on the page to make it a better resource on the topic at hand?

[CayenneRed89]

Thanks for the response!   The right pages are not showing for the targeted keywords.  The homepage is being ranked instead.  Yet the homepage doesn't have the keywords represented on it. Google is taking the Dmoz description of the homepage and is using that to rank (for the targeted keywords)???

The pages do show on Google site: search and they do have images on them.   Each page has six images on them.  We have ensured the size of the images are ok.  The copy on the page is at the bottom after the images - could this be an issue?

I have checked on Screaming Frog - nothing in particular stands out.

i know how we can stop google reading dmoz description which will be implemented....but I don't think this will resolve the issue....?

We have noticed - very strangely - the right page gets ranked - then google changes to the homepage????

Any suggestions... It's baffling me...

[RuthBurrReedy]

Is the problem that the page isn't appearing in the index, or that it isn't ranking for its target terms?

If the page has a lot of images but doesn't otherwise have much copy, it may be that Google is determining it to be too similar to other pages on your site and so is not displaying it. If it's not being indexed at all (doesn't show up in a site: search or when you search for a block of copy in quotations), double-check that your robots.txt isn't blocking it and that you don't have a meta robots noindex tag on the page. The suggestion of running Screaming Frog on your site to make sure a crawler can find the page is a good one - Screaming Frog will also tell you if the page is returning a weird HTTP status or is blocked by robots.

[ofw12387]

First think i would do is to check the url with Screaming Frog SEO Spider, anyway a link would be really helpful

[TheWebMastercom]

Are you able to share a link to the page in question?