Dislodged own ranking with poorer quality page?
-
Hi,
So last week we where ranking within the top two pages for google for a results page at something like rank 21 -
https://www.whichledlight.com/t/g9-led-bulbs
We have been tracking this page and earned a few decent domain authority links here. Today when the new rankings came in it looks like a blog page we wrote a while back has jumped several pages to number 13 in the rankings - ok so not the end of the world BUT our results page seems to have disappeared from the rankings.
You can see from the screen shot in the attached link at some point Moz / Google has noted that both the pages are relevent in some capaicty. Has Google decided that because both pages are from the site and both are showing ranking signals for the same traffic that one should go? It also seems weird that this blog one would come from nowhere to rank so highly in the course of a week. Perhaps they have changed their algorithm?
This is a bit of a concern for us as it is unclear whats happened - especially after we where so close to getting to page one for a valued search term.
-
I would say a few factors at play
- Just guessing, but if the ranking in question is "best g9 led bulbs" then the post outranks partly because it's in the HTML page title tag and H1, while it's not in the product page
- While only part of the equation, the blog post has over 500 words and the product listing page has under 250. Word count isn't the only metric, but it's a large influencer
- You have one internal link from the blog post to the product listing page, consider building out more - this is a good starting guide https://www.gotchseo.com/internal-linking/
- There are some longstanding SEO basics that may still apply here, such as using the keyword early on in the page, having content higher in the page, etc. While not always possible on ecommerce pages, keep in mind when there's opportunity
Hope that helps, let me know if you have any further questions!
-
Nice work! Improve that page and really kick ass.
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
-
Will Reducing Number of Low Page Authority Page Increase Domain Authority?
Our commercial real estate site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) contains about 800 URLs. Since 2012 the domain authority has dropped from 35 to about 20. Ranking and traffic dropped significantly since then. The site has about 791 URLs. Many are set to noindex. A large percentage of these pages have a Moz page authority of only "1". It is puzzling that some pages that have similar content to "1" page rank pages rank much better, in some cases "15". If we remove or consolidate the poorly ranked pages will the overall page authority and ranking of the site improve? Would taking the following steps help?: 1. Remove or consolidate poorly ranking unnecessary URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Update content on poorly ranking URLs that are important?
3. Create internal text links (as opposed to links from menus) to critical pages? A MOZ crawl of our site's URLs is visible at the link below. I am wondering if the structure of the site is just not optimized for ranking and what can be done to improve it. THANKS. https://www.dropbox.com/s/oqchfqveelm1q11/CRAWL www.nyc-officespace-leader.com (1).csv?dl=0 Thanks,
Alan0 -
Ranking 2 pages on the same domain in the same SERP
I thought it was generally said that Google will favour 1 page per domain for a particular SERP, but I have seen examples where that is not the case (i.e. Same domain is ranking 2 different pages on the 1st page of the SERPs...) Are there any "tricks" to taking up 2 first page SERP positions, or am I mistaken that this doesn't always happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm0 -
Checking Rankings Again & Again Can Drop Rankings
Is it possible that if i check my google rankings again & again it can drop ranking?Like checking where do my keywords rank every hours rank drop the rankings? Because this indirectly affects the CTR. Might be because of it? No one has faced such an weird thing before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Ranking Page - Category vs. Blog Post - What is best for CTR?
Hi, I am not sure wether I shall rank with a category page, or create a new post. Let me explain... If I google for 'Basic SEO' I see an article from Rand with Authorship markup. That's cool so I can go straight to this result because I know there might be some good insight. BUT: 'Basic SEO' is also an category at MOZ an it is not ranking. On the other hand, if I google for 'advanced SEO' then the MOZ category for 'advanced SEO' is ranking. But there is no authorship image, so users are much less likely to click on that result. Now, I want to rank for a very important keyword for me (content keyword, not transactional). Therefor, I have a category called 'yoga exercises'. But shall I rather create an post about them only to increase CTR due to Google Authorship? I read in Google guidelines that Authorship on homepage an category pages are not appreciated. Hope you have some insights that can help me out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal0 -
Ranking of Moz "A" grade page.
Hello, I built a site in Weebly recently and it was indexed by Google and the one page in fact ranked #1 for one keyword. I used absolutely no SEO optimization techniques for this. It then rapidly dropped out of sight (not surprising ). I have now optimized the site in general and specifically the page www.insolvencylifeline.co.za/voluntary-sequestration-process as recommended by Moz. All the optimization was on-page, except that I also used the SEOProfiler tool to submit the site to their list of search engines recommended and I manually linked to a number of reputable directories. I did this on 09/03. If I search for www.insolvencylifeline.co.za/voluntary-sequestration-process I can see the page has been cached on 10/3. However,if I search for any of my 3 search terms for example "voluntary sequestration" and then do an advanced search for "insolvencylifeline", I only get search results for pages cached before 9/3. My page www.insolvencylifeline.co.za/voluntary-sequestration-process which I know is fully optimized (“A” Moz grade) for the search term, does not rank at all. Also if I search for www.insolvencylifeline.co.za, I can see that the page also was cached on 10/3. However, it does not show www.insolvencylifeline.co.za/voluntary-sequestration-process at all and the other pages shown were all cached before 9/3. Does this mean that the page www.insolvencylifeline.co.za/voluntary-sequestration-process does not rank at all even though it is indexed? If so, any thoughts on why? Regards, Gerhard.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gerrhard0 -
My homepage doesn't rank anymore. It's been replaced by irrelevant subpages which rank around 100-200 instead of top 5.
Hey guys, I think I got some kind of penalty for my homepage. I was in top5 for my keywords. Then a few days ago, my homepage stopped ranking for anything except searching for my domain name in Google. sitename.com/widget-reviews/ previously ranked #3 for "widget reviews"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearetribe
but now....
sitename.com/widget-training-for-pet-cats/ is ranking #84 for widget reviews instead. Similarly across all my other keywords, irrelevant, wrong pages are ranking. Did I get some kind of penalty?0 -
Pages On Subfolder Not Ranking
A subdirectory/folder on our website doesn't seem to rank for any keywords where the same type of pages on the same competition level keywords rank perfectly fine. For awhile the pages weren't getting indexed but were crawled regularly. Can't seem to figure the problem out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bprimeelitellc0 -
How do Google Site Search pages rank
We have started using Google Site Search (via an XML feed from Google) to power our search engines. So we have a whole load of pages we could link to of the format /search?q=keyword, and we are considering doing away with our more traditional category listing pages (e.g. /biology - not powered by GSS) which account for much of our current natural search landing pages. My question is would the GoogleBot treat these search pages any differently? My fear is it would somehow see them as duplicate search results and downgrade their links. However, since we are coding the XML from GSS into our own HTML format, it may not even be able to tell.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardUpton610