Lower Level Pages Being Ranked for Key Terms
-
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?
-
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
-
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.
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
-
Page ranked then disappeared
Recently there have been a a couple of pages form my website that ranked well, in top 5 for a couple of days then they disappear suddenly, they are not at all seen in google search results no matter how narrow I search for them. I checked my search console, there seems to be no issues with the page, but when I check google analytics, I do not get any data from that page since the day it disappeared, and it does not even show up on the 'active pages' section no matter I keep the url open in multiple computers.
Technical SEO | | JoelssonMedia
Has anyone else faced this issue? is there a solution to it?0 -
Why did I lose my Page 1 ranking for my main term?
My site is http://www.killthezombies.com. I have historically ranked on page 1 for the term "zombie games" up until the beginning of 2012, since my site was launched in 2008. Now I am not in the top 100 at all, since Panda. Over the last year, I've tried many things to answer and solve this problem. I've cleaned up onsite issues, and I've tried to be more active in link building since I historically allowed my users to build links organically. While I don't expect to rank #1, since many of my competitors have the term "zombie games" in their domain, and they are far more aggressive on backlink building than I am, I do not understand why my domain is not even in the top 100. It's clear I used to rank, and that Bing and DuckDuckGo still think KillTheZombies.com belongs on page 1. I have reached out to Google to see if I've been penalized, and they actually got back to me to say I have not been. Google Webmaster Tools shows no crawl issues or warnings. I have many #1 rankings for terms like "zombie killing games", "kill zombies", etc. Does Google now think my site is about "kill the zombies" and somehow not about "zombie games", which is clearly my subject matter and something I've optimized for?
Technical SEO | | webkrew-889150 -
Unstable ranking
Hello, I own a website wich lately (since like few months ago) have a unstable ranking, I mean that one day I get 800 organic visits (good sells) and then a week when organic visits fall to 700,600,500,400.. then up again Why does this happen? I am lossing ranking :S site : todorepuestoselectro(dot)com Thank you very much im learning a lot here!
Technical SEO | | matiw0 -
Pages extensions
Hi guys, We're in the process of moving one of our sites to a newer version of the CMS. The new version doesn't support page extensions (.aspx) but we'll keep them for all existing pages (about 8,000) to avoid redirects. The technical team is wondering about the new pages - does it make any difference if the new pages are without extensions, except for usability? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | lgrozeva0 -
If a permanent redirect is supposed to transfer SEO from the old page to the new page, why has my domain authority been impacted?
For example, we redirected our old domain to a new one (leaving no duplicate content on the old domain) and saw a 40% decrease in domain authority. Isn't a permanent redirect supposed to transfer link authority to the place it is redirecting to? Did I do something wrong?
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Killing Page Rank flow
Another SEO has told a friend to nofollow certain internal links i.e. to their own website. There are no hard feelings but this sounds like nonsense to me. Firstly, I'm sure Matt Cutts said that the link juice will not be redistributed amongst the other links (can't find the post - does anyone have the URL or confirmation?). Secondly (and this is obvious) those pages which have links to other pages in the website will have no link juice to pass back, resulting in a lower "total sum" and the inability for that PR to flow back. In short it seems silly. Any thoughts would be interesting to hear.
Technical SEO | | IPROdigital0 -
Google doesn't rank the best page of our content for keywords. How to fix that?
Hello, We have a strange issue, which I think is due to legacy. Generally, we are a job board for students in France: http://jobetudiant.net (jobetudiant == studentjob in french) We rank quite well (2nd or 3rd) on "Job etudiant <city>", with the right page (the one that lists all job offers in that city). So this is great.</city> Now, for some reason, Google systematically puts another of our pages in front of that: the page that lists the jobs offers in the 'region' of that city. For example, check this page. the first link is a competitor, the 3rd is the "right" link (the job offers in annecy), but the 2nd link is the list of jobs in Haute Savoie (which is the 'departement'- equiv. to county) in which Annecy is... that's annoying. Is there a way to indicate Google that the 3rd page makes more sense for this search? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jgenesto0 -
Local SEO - ranking a page for two different cities
I have a site that ranks very well for {service}{cityA} but I want it to rank for {service}{cityB} too. My first thought is to create a separate landing page optimised for {service}{cityB}, but is there a better option? Have one page for {service} and try and get it to rank for {city A} and {cityB} by using different anchor text? Anything else?
Technical SEO | | SEOboarder0