Can we talk a bit more about cannibalisation? Will Google pick one page and disregard others.
-
Hi all.
I work for an e-commerce site called TOAD Diaries and we've been building some landing pages recently. Our most generic page was for '2017 Diaries'. Take a look here.
Initial results are encouraging as this page is ranking top page for a lot of 'long tail' search queries, e.g) '2017 diaries a4', '2017 diaries a5', '2017 diaries week to view' etc.
Interesting it doesn't even rank top 50 for the 'head term'... '2017 diaries'. **And our home page outranks it for this search term. **Yet it seems clear that this page is considered relevant and quality by Google it ranks just fine for the long tails.
Question: Does this mean Google 'chosen' our home page over the 2017-page landing page? And that's why the 2017-page effectively doesn't rank for it's 'head term'? (I can't see this as many times a website will rank multiple times such as amazon)
But any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Also, what would you do in this scenario? Work on home-page to try to push it up for that term and not worry about the landing page?
Any suggestions or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Hope that makes sense. Do shout if not.
Thanks in advance.
Isaac.
-
I think that "2017 Diaries" has a bit of competition and this site is still getting started. It probably has slowly rising traffic but needs some high-quality linkable, shareable, noteworthy content that people want to read. The blog is focused on product promotion rather than something to inspire the customer to write, plan, schedule, etc.
-
Thank you so much... Moz should have a 'great answer' button! Yes, I've been thinking this for a while now and I think this is a really good approach.
Do you have thoughts on why the 2017 page ranks SO poorly though (for that specific term)? The only rational I can think of is that Google has effectively 'chosen' our homepage over the LP. Have you come across anything similar in the past?
Thanks again, better get cracking!
Isaac.
-
I think that your homepage ranks well for "2017 Diaries" because your site is all about diaries. Your homepage is probably more powerful than your 2017 Diaries page and that is probably why the homepage ranks higher.
So, if this is the top query for bring you business, I would optimize the homepage for it, get relevant products on the homepage and go for it. Right now your homepage could be greatly improved for "2017 Diaries" because "2017 only appears twice in plain text at the bottom of the page and is not in the title tag. I wonder what your homepage could do if properly optimized for this term?
If I owned your site I would change the homepage optimization and content a few times per year to take advantage of a new year starting, back to school, summer fitness, etc. This would move my most powerful page from battle to battle at various times of the year. Perhaps you do this?
Also, if I owned the site I would have lots of articles about how various types of people use the products that you sell, historical information about famous people and their appointment, journaling, and diary habits. I'd be doing a little more cross-selling of writing implements on the diaries page. Just tossing these in based upon my experience in a similar niche.
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
-
Paginated category pages still showing in Google
Despite our blog using rel=next and rel=”prev” we’re still finding paginated pages getting impressions in Google, suggesting they are taking up unnecessary crawl budget. An example is: https://www.theukdomain.uk/seo/page/2/ What steps would you recommend I take to most benefit my sites SEO? Thanks, Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sjefferies0 -
Important category pages that can and should be found in SERP but can not be reached by navigating on the webshop itself
Hi, On a webshop we are optimizing, the main navigation consists of the 5 main categories to which all of the products can be assigned. However, the main tabs in the navigation just activate a drop down with all of the subcategories. For example: the tab in the navigation is 'Garden equipment' and when you click on this tab, the drop down is shown with subcategories like 'Lawn mowers', 'Leaf blowers' and so on. Now, the page 'Garden equipment' is one of the main category pages and we want this page to rank of course. This shouldn't be a problem, since there is a separate URL for this page that can be indexed and that can be reached through internal links on the website. However, this page can not be reached when a visitor initially comes on the homepage of the webshop, since the tab in the navigation isn't clickable. This page will only be reached when a subcategory is selected, and then when the visitor goes back to the category page through the breadcrumb or through an internal link. Is it a problem that these important overview category pages can not be reached immediately? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Links / Top Pages by Page Authority ==> pages shouldnt be there
I checked my site links and top pages by page authority. What i have found i dont understand, because the first 5-10 pages did not exist!! Should know that we launched a new site and rebuilt the static pages so there are a lot of new pages, and of course we deleted some old ones. I refreshed the sitemap.xml (these pages are not in there) and upload it in GWT. Why those old pages appear under the links menu at top pages by page authority?? How can i get rid off them? thx, Endre
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Neckermann0 -
Newly designed page ranks in Google but then disappears - at a loss as to why.
Hi all, I wondered if you could help me at all please? We run a site called getinspired365.com (which is not optimised) and in the last 2 weeks have tried to optimise some new pages that we have added. For example, we have optimised this page - http://getinspired365.com/lifes-a-bit-like-mountaineering-never-look-down This page was added to Google's index via webmaster tools. When I then did a search for the full quote it came back 2nd in Google's search. If I did a search for half the quote (Life is a bit like mountaineering) it also ranked 2nd. We had another quote page that we'd optimised that displayed similar behaviour (it ranked 4th). But then for some reason when I now do the search it doesn't rank in the top 100 results. This, despite, an unoptimised "normal" page ranking 4th for a search such as: Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered. So our domain doesn't seem to be penalised as our "normal" pages are ranking. These pages aren't particularly well designed from an SEO standpoint. But our new pages - which are optimised - keep disappearing from Google, despite the fact they still show as indexed. I've rendered the pages and everything appears fine within Google Webmaster Tools. At a bit of a loss as to why they'd drop so significantly? A few pages I could understand but they've all but been removed. Any one seen this before, and any ideas what could be causing the issue? We have a different URL structure for our new pages in that we have the quote appear in the URL. All the content (bar the quote) that you see in the new pages are unique content that we've written ourselves. Could it be that we've over optimised and Google view these pages as spam? Many thanks in advance for all your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWhyley0 -
Will Using Attributes For Landing Pages In Magento Dilute Page Rank?
Hello Mozzers! We have an ecommerce site built on Magento. We would like to use attribute filters in our layered navigation for landing page purposes. Each page will have a unique URL, Meta Title and Meta Description. For example: URL: domain.com/art/abstract (category is Art, attribute is Abstract) Title: Abstract Art For Sale Meta: Blah Blah Blah Currently these attribute pages are not being indexed by google as they are set in google parameters. We would like to edit google parameters to start indexing some of the attribute filters that users search for, so they can be used as landing pages. Does anyone have experience with this? Is this a good idea? What are the consequences? Will this dilute Page Rank? Could this destroy the world? Cheers! MozAddict
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozAddict0 -
Why Google is not showing right title tags of my website inner pages?
Hello Everyone, I have a same problem with my 3 websites that Google is not showing right title tags of inner pages of my websites goldcoast-plumbers.com: http://screencast.com/t/2AEzDcoTkWF accountants-goldcoast.com.au: metalrecyclers-brisbane.com.au One common thing is all these websites is All in one SEO Pack Plugin for SEO Is it a problem? Thanks in advance for your help! Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Asjad0 -
Huge google index with un-relevant pages
Hi, i run a site about sport matches, every match has a page and the pages are generated automatically from the DB. pages are not duplicated, but over time some look a little bit similar. after a match finishes it has no internal links or sitemap entry, but it's reachable by direct URL and continues to be on google index. so over time we have more than 100,000 indexed pages. since past matches have no significance and they're not linked and a match can repeat and it may look like duplicate content....what you suggest us to do: when a match is finished - not linked, but appears on the index and SERP 301 redirect the match Page to the match Category which is a higher hierarchy and is always relevant? use rel=canonical to the match Category do nothing.... *301 redirect will shrink my index status, some say a high index status is good... *is it safe to 301 redirect 100,000 pages at once - wouldn't it look strange to google? *would canonical remove the past matches pages from the index? what do you think? Thanks, Assaf.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stassaf0 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0