Lower Level Pages Being Ranked for Key Terms

[Ham1979]

Good Afternoon

We've been having problems with a site for a little while now. It had a penalty (partial link) a few years ago and never really recovered back to it's full potential despite the fact that the penalty was eventually removed and we've since changed the domain completely as well as moving over to https and left behind / disavowed bad links.

In the Moz ranking stats now, I'm seeing that some of our lower level pages are ranking for core terms and the erratic nature of the ranking graph seems to indicate that Google is confused and not knowing what page to pull. For example, the top level page would be Hotel in Spain but the page that is ranking for that term is one of the individual hotel information (lower level) pages lets say the Holiday Inn .

The lower level page has info on the individual property but also makes reference to it being a "Cheap Hotel In Spain"

My suggestion to resolve the problem is to scale back the references to the top level terms on the hotel pages and reintroduce breadcrumb links to help Google follow the structure of the site again

Does this sound reasonable or would anyone be able to suggest anything else to try?

[Ham1979]

Thanks very much for your reply

I think in the past we had scaled back on our exact match anchor text in the internal links based on advice from an Seo agency we had worked.

Whereas before we would have had a list of links in a box on the homepage to our most popular options saying for instance Hotel in Spain, Hotel in Gibraltar etc. This was changed to have the heading of the box as Hotels and the link anchor texts changed to the location Spain, Gibraltar

So I'm guessing the agency overreacted to the issue of exact match anchor text for external links and didn't need to apply it to the internal structure

[DmitriiK]

Howdy.

What you need to do is look into internal links structure with what anchor texts are used. And using that to strengthen internal "rankings" of pages. Also look into external links and what pages and anchor texts are used there. Increase the flow to higher level pages, they will outrank the lower level pages.

Hope this helps.