Picture this: You discover that your site is ranking for a keyword you've been targeting. Cause for celebration, right? But what if that ranking page is irrelevant, wrong, or simply not the best choice? This situation is more common than you might think, and results in a good deal of frustration for SEOs. Rand shows you how to cope when you find that your valuable queries are sending traffic to the wrong URLs in today's Whiteboard Friday.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about what to do when the wrong page is ranking for the keywords that you care about. This happens to pretty much every site I have ever dealt with. People have this big frustration that, "Hey, searchers are performing a query. I'm trying to come up with this URL, and instead Google is ranking this other URL for my website." It's not universal on every query, but it happens to nearly every site on at least a few of their queries. There are ways that you can deal with it.
First off, I'd urge you to prioritize when you're going through this process, prioritize only the ones that matter the most to you. So take good care to look through your Google Webmaster Tools/Search Console now, and look at the keywords that are sending you the most traffic, look at the URLs that are receiving the most traffic from Google search, which you could see in your Web Analytics or your Moz Analytics account. If you notice that there are particular high-value queries that are sending traffic to URLs that you would prefer would go to other URLs, because you believe those are more relevant or would perform better, then you should prioritize this particular process.
So let's start here. It's an example that I just discovered recently. If you do a search for "metal frame eyeglasses," you will find a couple of websites that are ranking brilliantly, coastal.com with their "buy metal glasses frames online and save money," 39dollarglasses.com with their metal frame glasses. These are both super relevant to metal frame eyeglasses. Clearly, I have expressed the query intent that I want metal frames. These two results are giving them to me.
But look at the third result. This is LensCrafters, which obviously is a big brand, at least here in the United States, and the page that's ranking for them in the third position is "Women's Eyeglasses & Designer Glasses." Now LensCrafters is a much bigger brand than either of these. They have dramatically more domain authority, and the vast majority, overwhelming majority of their pages, at least at this top level of category, have far more links pointing to them than either of these do.
I would guess that if LensCrafters had a good page, the correct page here, they could at least outrank potentially 39dollarglasses and maybe even rank number one above coastal.com, although I do like the Coastal guys quite a bit.
So LensCrafters, why is their women's eyeglasses and designer glasses page ranking for this? Look, "Browse glasses for women online or stop into a LensCrafters. Find the perfect pair. Filter by metal." Filter by metal? That suggests to me that if I were to go to this page and filter by metal, I would then get to a page that might be relevant for metal frames, but this is not that page. I'm guessing, and I bet the data would back me up here, that the click-through rate on this third one is worse than it probably is for number four, maybe even number five, or number six, because this does not look like a relevant page for that query.
It is not saying these are LensCrafters metal frames. I don't even know if LensCrafters has metal frames that I could potentially get to. In fact, one of the frustrating things you'll see is that they've got this "filter by titanium." If you go to the page and then you try and filter by titanium, the filter is grayed out. You can't actually click it.
So okay, maybe LensCrafters has some other issues. But certainly if I'm doing SEO for them, I don't want this page ranking. I want my metal frames pages ranking. So we can go through a process like this, because, in this case, it's probably killing not only their click-through rate, which hurts not just this page but could hurt the lenscrafters.com website overall in how Google considers them as click-through rate could be potentially a signal that's applied across a domain, as is pogo-sticking, people are clicking it and then bouncing back to the search result because they're not happy with the result. It probably is killing their conversion rates too, which potentially sucks even worse.
Step 1: Diagnose the underlying issue
You want to diagnose what the underlying issue here is, and to do this one of the things that I do is I do a search that looks like this. I did a search for "metal frame eyeglasses site:lenscrafters.com." I want to see, does LensCrafters even have a page on the site with those keywords that is well targeted? Then I searched through the first couple of pages with results and found nothing.
So in LensCrafters case, the problem is (A) a relevant page doesn't even exist on the website. So step one for their SEO person, talk to the team. Get someone to create a metal frames page. In fact, that's probably true of many of their other filters too. If it's true for metal frames, it's undoubtedly true for other things.
They also will have to do some work, because remember that LensCrafters' site right now is bifurcated into women's and men's glasses, and they probably need a landing page that is specifically metal frames for either women or men and then you choose based on this. When you have those bifurcated or multifaceted search elements that you need to serve, you often need to create very different kinds of landing pages.
(B) The case could be — this isn't the case for LensCrafters — but it could be that the relevant page is having indexing or crawling or content or link issues. Indexing and crawling, crawling could mean that you've blocked it by robots.txt, and that could be the case, by the way, with LensCrafters. I didn't try and look on their own site. It could be that the indexing is having a problem because there's a meta robots tag. It could be that the content itself is not crawlable and parsable by Google. Maybe it's all image content, or it's all behind some complicated JavaScript framework, or it's all post-loaded through Ajax or something like that that Google can't access it.
It could be a content issue, where essentially you have a page about metal frames, but there's not enough content or not enough unique content or not enough unique value provided by that content for Google to feel like it deserves to be indexed and ranked.
Or it could be a link issue, meaning that there are not enough internal or external links or not important enough ones pointing to that page to make it separately valuable and to show Google that it deserves to rank.
Or (C), it could be that it has all these things going on, but unfortunately, and this does definitely happen, is that the ranking ability is overwhelmed by another page, meaning that — this again isn't LensCrafters' deal — but imagine if their women's eyeglasses page heavily focused on metal frames and talked about a bunch of the nice metal frames that they have for women, mentioned words like "titanium" and "aluminum" and the flexibility that metal provides and all these kinds of benefits that you would expect to find on the metal frames page, but that Google is seeing on this other page, and this page is also getting a lot of links for it. Maybe external websites have linked to it for some reason. Internal links are pointing to it incorrectly or just in large quantity, and so then you need to fix that ranking ability issue.
Step 2: Create/Bolster the relevant page
You want to create and/or bolster the relevant page for it. So in this case, LensCrafters has to create that page. But in your case, you may already have a page that you know should be ranking, and so you want to promote that page. You want to bolster that page's potential ranking signals. That's things like...
- Content: We're talking about keywords here. We're also talking about related terms and phrases. We are talking about uniqueness of value that is provided through the content. Then we're talking about...
- Internal link signals: So looking at the pages on your website that link to that page and link to other pages on your site and making sure, that in the grand scheme of things, you're pointing the right links from the right pages to this page internally.
- User and usage data: We know that Google is looking at some forms of user and usage data, and I think many of us speculate that they are including those elements in their ranking algorithms, and certainly we've seen lots of cases where when one of these pages gets much more use, you can see that it tends to rank better, and correlation/causation. But user and usage data is something you should look at. For example, if you see that your metal frames page was doing much more poorly, was converting visitors much worse, was having a much higher bounce rate than the women's eyeglasses page, well, now I've got a theory that this page is ranking because Google saw that people were performing much better there than they were on the metal frames page. I need to go fix up that metal frames page. I need to get that user and usage data back up.
- External link signals: So looking through Open Site Explorer or Majestic or Ahrefs and seeing: What are the external links that point to this page versus my other page? Could it be the case that external link signals are overwhelming everything else, and maybe I need to go talk to those external linkers and get them to point to the correct pages?
Step 3: Degrade the non-relevant page
I want to do something that is very unusual in the SEO world. I want to actually degrade the ranking signals of the non-relevant page. So I would do things like (A) take away keywords and related terms or make them harder for the engines to parse.
For example, if I saw, hey, you know this has this "filter by metal" on here. Maybe I'm going to make that filter an image, or maybe I'm going to make it behind a tab, or maybe I'm going to make it a post-loaded JavaScript, or that kind of thing. Or maybe I'm going to just make sure that mention of metal is the only mention of metal on the page. I'm going to remove the other ones on there.
I also want to re-point internal links. So I'm going to basically look at those internal links that probably should have been pointing to the metal page, take them away from the women's eyeglasses page, point them to the right version. Then I want to make sure that there's an obvious, at least one, obvious anchor text-rich link from this page as well as any other pages that I saw ranking for that "metal frame eyeglass site:lenscrafters.com." I want to see that I've got that great anchor text link, internal anchor text link pointing from all those pages to the target page that I want ranking.
Finally, if I need to, I might request some external link changes. So I might go to someone from the press, or a blogger, or a forum, or whatever external website, a partner of mine that's linking. I might say, "Hey, you're linking to the wrong page of mine. Can you re-point that?" Or, "Hey, you're linking with this anchor text. I'd really prefer you link with this other anchor text."
Step 4: If all else fails...
Last but potentially not least, if everything else is failing and you have a page that it's only ranking for this particular keyword phrase, in this case, LensCrafters, they probably don't want to kill their women's eyeglasses page because that's probably ranking for lots of other things. But let's say it was a particular page that was deeper in the site. What you might do is you might consider taking that page, which we're going to call X and 301 redirecting it to the page you do want ranking, page Y.
Then you take the content that was at X and you recreate that content at an entirely new URL, which you are then going to modify and relink up in your site's architecture, but you're going to continue 301'ing this one over here. That way, any external links that are pointing here, and many of the internal links that might have been pointing here, are now redirected so that they go over to Y, the page that you want ranking.
When you recreate this page, X2, make sure that you're thinking about modifying the content. What you don't want to do is confuse Google by taking exactly the content that was on X and recreating it precisely on X2, because Google could interpret that as, "Oh, oh, oh, they just moved the page over here. We see the 301 here, but we're pretty sure they didn't mean that 301, and what they really meant was this page is now here, and so we're going to continue ranking this one." That's bad, bad news for you and for your rankings and for your search traffic.
All right everyone, look forward to your comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
In SEO, it is a major problem for everyone if we not aware of this fact that why this is happening ( ranking page is irrelevant). But this WBF makes it easy to understandable. I've noticed many time that when we are finding some solution for this kind of issues the same time Moz's post come with the solutions. well nice post Rand, You always have been written this kind of post that's why we are always waiting for the WBF.
I think this is a topic in SEO that doesn't get the attention it deserves. People just see rankings and think "oh, great we're ranking for that term, next item". Most of the time when I start keyword research and on-page optimizations I have to check for cannibalization and usually a sub-optimal page is being optimized and ranked for the wrong keywords.
The keywords and page focus do not match the searchers intent which is paramount to rankings, UX, and overall organic success.
Another major issue, especially with smaller sites is that the home page is the only page really ranking for anything and the content of the inner pages is just weak and will never rank. Or the inner pages just have no link authority whatsoever.
As long as your pages are focusing on high quality content that matches the searchers intent, you shouldn't need to do much other than increasing external links to your inner pages.
Hi Rand, I love how you look away from the cam when you say:" I'd really prefer you link with this other anchor text." Hope its not a Keyword Rich anchor you are asking for :)
Great explained how to solve a problem, that happens more often than a lot of people think. And great is, that you show how to find out if the problem exists.
Ha! Yeah, it's tough asking for that anchor text or link location change. Redirection or canonicalization can be the better solution if you've got a lot of external links that need to change.
I never thought, to see an advice like "asking for achortext" in a Whiteboard Friday :)
But I knew what is ment and how careful we should do this.
Checking the internal links is a good shout. Pay particular attention to the anchor text in the links, especially if the blog is regularly updated. I've seen examples where a single link using the exact match keyword, but to the wrong URL, can have a dramatic effect. Also check that the 2 pages do not overlap, which could have Panda implications.
Another trick is to use "site:[domain]" to check that the desired page shows up at all in SERPs. The page may show up as indexed and cached, but if Google doesn't want to display it for any keywords then there may be deeper issues.
As a precautionary measure, I use an RSS feed to send me email alerts every time a blog is uploaded. That way I can review the internal linking which I don't have control over and ensure that these problems don't sneak up on me.
Interesting. That seems like a lot of work, though certainly a safe way to play it. Something like Screaming Frog, OnPage.org, or Deepcrawl might also be useful if you wanted to do the spot-checking more intermittently vs. always monitoring.
I find those tools are best for identifying issues after they occur, especially screaming frog. If the blogs are emailed to me then it takes less than a minute to check the internal links, which can save hours of work later. Unless the client is blogging like crazy then I prefer it. It's also a good way to monitor the quality of content I don't control.
Wonderful post Rand, I think everyone needs a solution for this issue. Hey Rand what in the case when we think having quality content and doing the external linking for specific keywords with URL. What to do in case when doing correct things related on-page and of-page then also Google is changing or preferring another URL for the same keyword.
Great WBF. In personal experience, degrading and anchor text in links are the two most influential factors. Thanks once again Rand.
Agreed. The frustrating part is when that anchor text is external, and you need to either get another site to change where/how they point those links or consider the more drastic option of redirection.
Hi Rand
Thank you , very timely WBF for me. I have this issue where a PDF is outranking a dedicated page. Any suggestions on how to degrade a PDF?
Thanks
Erkut
Crazy idea here, but if you have the resources to do so would be awesome. What if you added a take notes feature with autosave? If you have an account each time you access a video you would be shown the notes you initially took. I got this idea from a study course I'm taking at Magoosh.
Interesting idea. Maybe something the folks at Wistia can do to make their video embed tech even better :-)
This issue is also common in local search. Often websites rank with their home page for a small location even though they have the appropriate location page, which will be much more useful for the users who do that search.
Many "location specific" pages are pretty useless though. Thin content that doesn't really tell anything more than the NAP and hours. Always add value!
Yes, of course. But we were referring to the ones that DO add value, not just doorway pages. However even with quality content those pages get outranked by the home page, which has a lot more links pointing to it.
Yeah, I've seen this happen often with small business sites especially. It can definitely be a challenge to get enough authority to those pages to have them rank properly.
This is always one of the first things I do when I am working on a new site. Linking from the ranking page with exact anchor text seems to do the trick most of the time and can show great results within a few weeks.
You just add a link to the page that you want to rank instead? Nothing else?
HI Rand,
I find these article very interesting. I am also facing this problem in beginning of my SEO Career. Thank for sharing.
Love this - it happens ALL the time, and I see a lot of local SEOs just kind of go "well at least we're on page 1 for something, good enough!"
Exactly! Pointless rankings, but let's keep working on something else. lol!
I have a question. In the sitemaps you can place a range of priority. This value is only to make sitemaps to cool before search engine, but it serves to step 3. right?
Sitemaps put the code for you to understand the range of priority I said:
<url><loc>www.........</loc><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.50</priority></url>
Excellent WBF as always, Rand. We worked with a client that had precisely this issue, and we were able to rank the correct candidate page using a number of these tactics. Glad to see you vouching for them as well.
Is it possible to decrease value of page by using canonicalization?
Example:
I have Page 1 to rank with query ABZ
But Google ranks ABZ query with page 2 and page 3.
Now if I add canonical tag to page 2 and page 3, would that solve the issue and help to rank page 1 again?
Yeah, Mike!, I've seen this work, but it's not foolproof. For example, if the content on page 2 doesn't match page 3 closely, Google might not respect the rel=canonical. In that case, probably better to 301, recreate page 2 at another URL, and then shift around your internal links appropriately. Certainly, though, you can start with the canonical tag and see if it does the trick.
Hi Rand, does a low CTR on some of the internal pages affect the SEO value of the primary domain?
Consider this example, a branding agency website with portfolio and case studies of their clients.
Example Client 1: Blue Widgets, Located in Dubai
The agency website has a case study pages for Blue Widgets.
What if for a search term; 'Blue Widgets Dubai' the agency case study page is ranking on page one, and most of the people are not clicking on this link because they are looking for the real brand website?
Do this pages low CTR affects the SEO value of the main domain?
This plagues a couple of the ecommerce sites I work on... With some, it's a case of too many similar filtered landing pages that don't need to exist and need a good culling, so products end up ranking for broader terms. And with others, like in Rand's example, main category pages are performing well whilst the filtered landing pages are 51+ and get no traffic. So I kill off the landing page, and further optimise the category page for the keyword it's ranking for - contrary to this week's WBF. Am I going about this all backwards? Looks like I'll have to dig deeper and reconsider this strategy...
Very eye-opening WBF, Rand! Thank you!
When you say "kill off" do you redirect that landing page to the URL you want to rank? If so, that's basically what I'm suggesting as the path to take when all else (on page changes, internal link changes, etc) fails.
Hi Rand,
Good stuff and it happens all the time.
We once had a distributor page outranking one of our company branch pages. Both pages were on our site. Both were appearing in local search but in the wrong order.
There is one more solution you might want to try. Use a temporary redirect from the ranking page to the wannabe ranking page. We did this just long enough to make the redirect page vanish temporarily and the wannabe page take over the top position. We then removed the redirect and the distributor page reappeared but below the branch page.
Problem solved.
Interesting. A 302 redirect? I've seen Google sometimes follow those, but other times ignore them and continue to show the old page... Or maybe you're saying to 301 for a while, then remove the 301? I haven't tried that, but could imagine it working.
Hi Rand,
As soon as I saw the title to this video I felt like you had been reading my mind. It was only earlier this week that I noticed this was happening and that I needed to take a proper look at it and then low and behold, you do a video on the subject!
Excellent timing there and a really useful resource.
Thanks,
Dean
I have been reading your mind Dean. It's very helpful in coming up with WB Friday ideas :-)
If you follow the right practices it should never happen. A common mistake many SEO do is get greedy and optimise the same page for multiple keywords. This is not a good strategy specially in current times when the competition is so high in SEO.
Always keep a spreadsheet with records of what URL is optimised for what keywords. And then keep track of it to make sure you don't optimise the multiple pages for same keywords. You will end up competing with yourself.
Easy way to say this is if you are selling bananas, make different pages on differnt tyes of banaas and optimsie them accordingly. Also don't forget local SEO which means 'buy bananas New york'
Hey Rand,
Would you use the same approach if a subdomain outranked the page you wanted to rank?
Cheers,
Rand, if you re-create the page in your last example and do not edit the content, do you risk getting dinged for duplicate content?
No such thing.
Actually, Rand, we are facing the same issue for our website. This is a great post. Thank you very much for your informative whiteboard.
This WBF isn't just helpful to people who are trying to rank the right page but any page in general. Great info as usual!
This is a Whiteboard that definitely needed to be done. I actually had this exact issue and asked about it on the forum on June 10th, 2014. No one had a solid answer other than to do the 301 redirect...which is what I did and it worked.
But, if it ever comes up again or for anyone else who has to deal with this, this presentation will be extremely helpful.
Thanks you!
- Ruben
Google is indexing wrong page for search terms not on that page
I’m having a problem … the wrong page is indexing with Google, for search phrases “not on that page”.
Explained … On a website I developed, I have four products. For example sake, we’ll say these four products are:
1. Sneakers (search phrase: sneakers)
2. Boots (search phrase: boots)
3. Sandals (search phrase: sandals)
4. High heels (search phrase: high heels)
Error:
What is going “wrong” is … When the search phrase “high heels” is indexed by Google, my “Sneakers” page is being indexed instead (and ranking very well, like #2). The page that SHOULD be indexing, is the “High heels” page (not the sneakers page – this is the wrong search phrase, and it’s not even on that product page – not in URL, not in H1 tags, not in title, not in page text – nowhere, except for in the top navigation link).
Clue #1 … this same error is ALSO happening for my other search phrases, in exactly the same manner. i.e. … the search phrase “sandals” is ALSO resulting in my “Sneakers” page being indexed, by Google.
Clue #2 … this error is NOT happening with Bing (the proper pages are correctly indexing with the proper search phrases, in Bing).
Note 1: MOZ has given all my product pages an “A” ranking, for optimization.
Note 2: This is a WordPress website.
Note 3: I had recently migrated (3 months ago) most of this new website’s page content (but not the “Sneakers” page – this page is new) from an old, existing website (not mine), which had been indexing OK for these search phrases.
Note 4: 301 redirects were used, for all of the OLD website pages, to the new website.
I have tried everything I can think of to fix this, over a period of more than 30 days. Nothing has worked. I think the “clues” (it indexes properly in Bing) are useful, but I need help.
Thoughts?
I have watched your video from stat to finish and I learned many tips about how to handle correctly pages ranking for wrong keywords. In fact I have experienced this issue in some pages of my SEO projects and I have often solved it the easy Way by degrading the keyword density in the wrong pages and increasing it in the right pages.
Your approch to this issue is really complete and easy to follow.
Hey Rand.
Interesting topic and as you said it could almost happens on every page. I have a large site with 10k+ articles/content and over the last years the content has grown and we have hundreds of pages which have cannibalization issues. Some keywords are rambling around and have no clear page to stick with.
My idea is to follow your steps like decide if there is a right (more relevant) page, enhance thin relevant content/degrade wrong content, put internal links on nearby content pointing to right page and use rich anchor text.
My thought is when I use rich anchor text only (1 page = 1 anchor text) from now on does it harm the other rankings for each page and/or the entire rankings of the domain? Even it makes each page more relevant for the main keyword, do long tail rankings (e.g. from random anchor texts before) or random content rankings stay or drift away?
Besides that it makes the internal linking more difficult, but I think more relevant too. (less and only relevant links with rich anchor text)
Thx for your thoughts
Great post.
I find this most difficult when it's the sites homepage which is ranking for something. Take for example a local business. They might want to rank for "XYZ Manchester" and "XYZ Cheshire" on their homepage initially, but they want to branch out and move "XYZ Manchester" and "XYZ Cheshire" to an internal page instead of the homepage and maybe the homepage just wants to rank for "XYZ" or maybe a more competitive term like "XYZ London".
I've found that very difficult to achieve. When I've removed all of the Manchester and Cheshire content from the homepage, instead of picking up and ranking the new internal page, the homepage just dies for those terms. The new page is largely ignored.
Maybe I need to look at external linking in this case...?
Hi Rand!
This is a great post for people whose serious about SEO. I've been using rel=canonical in most of my company's pages which were very very not similar, and it seems working.
Next month I'll move to ecommerce company and I hope Google still have the same rule for rel=canonical :D
Thank you Rand!
HI Rand
I have a question, I am running a company and i have a site too, the issue is some one is doing negative SEO of my site, and unfortunately my site is ranking for some adult keywords which is very bad would you please suggest what should i do ?
Thanks in Advance :)
Hi Rand,
This is really useful WBF for me. Even i am facing the same problem from last 2-3 weeks for my client's site. But you gave me great idea to remove wrong web page and get ranked on right landing url for particular keyword. Thanks for sharing valuable WBF looking forward more.
Hi Rand,
Great post and perfect timing since this topic came up recently in our company.
Question: What if the query is pointing to the websites home page?
Ex. metal frame eyeglasses is searched and the Lenscrafters home page is in the SERP's.
This being the case I'm assuming that an anchor-rich-text from the home page to the metal frame eyglasses page could help. Any other feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Chris
Hi Rand,
Great article, thanks. This made me re-look at some client cases and made some interesting discoveries. In some cases the wrong pages were ranking. With your tips in mind it was relatively easy to fix. Thanks!
Chris.
thanks for the website is pretty good
Hi Rand!
Great one, but I do got a question, if everything you wrote wont work (or cant on the customer side) do you think it is a good idea to put noindex/nofollow on the wrong page? then maybe (and it is a big maybe) google will find by itself the right page? (as long as there is a "right page")
It can work, but in general, I don't love that approach. It kills a page that may be able to rank for other good keywords that you do want it to rank for, and you're not redirecting Google to a specific page on the site, which probably would work better.
If you do take this approach, I'd also strongly advise against the nofollow. Instead, use meta robots noindex, follow, so at least Google can see and send link equity to the pages it points to.
Best practice indeed! Thanks for sharing valuable information.
I'd try the webmaster tools of the search engine of your choice and have it downgraded manually.
Thanks Rand for the detailed presentation. For my website the MOZ rank is still at 12, and the ranking for competitive keywords is low. However, for some keywords, I rank on the first or second page. So, I am confused whether my site is in the Sandbox or is it because of low DA?
Nice Info... My query is "What if we had to keep the same keyword in both the pages... but doesn't want to rank one page (which is currently on SERP). We only want to target that keyword for some another page...?"
You can try linking the keyword phrase on the page you don't want ranking to the page you do want ranking, but if that doesn't work, you might want to go through the framework above.
Really interesting post. Our costumers often ask for his question. We try some advices and give you feedback ;)
Hi Rand
A follow up question:
Is there cases that even google is pointing to the wrong page you don't try to change it, and instead you modify page X to fit this keyword? (in this example - fit the womens glasses page to the metal keyword)
Thank you,
Elinor
That's definitely an option -- if it makes sense for the site, I'd say go for it!
Anyone have the wrong page coming up on an exact phrase search in Google? Our wrong page comes up even when we do the "search phrase in quotes." And that search phrase is not even on the page or in the source.
... Every Google search I've ever done seems to have the "search phrase in quotes" somewhere on the page, title, url, alt tag, or image name.
I Also Saw this Results in india as People are searching for government website(New launched websites most of time) but they get the result of the page in which this site was mentioned .. so people cant find the right result
Question on number 4, as long as you don't start a chain, it should be fine right?
Yeah. Redirect chains are no good, though Google will follow a couple hops at least (sometimes up to 3 or 4, but they're vocally against it).
Great WBF! I have a question about the redirect. I have created a 2nd page with similar content but used a canonicalisation meta tag to instruct Google to pass on any link juice to the page I want to rank for. I guess this is more of a diluted option than just doing a 301 redirect?
The rel=canonical method will often work nearly as well. It's pretty similar to a 301, so long as Google agrees that the pages are very similar. If they get the sense that you're improperly using a canonical and the pages are, in fact, quite different, they may not respect it.
Morning Rand,
Very interesting to degrade the ranking signals of a non-relevant page. I see how this would work, but it does sound dangerous. I'd be hesitant to test this as I feel it's better to have a page ranking even if it's not the most relevant. But to your point, serving a non-relevant page has its own set of problems (high bounce rates, diminishing conversion rates, pogo sticking, etc.) There's a lot to ponder here.
Great WBF, thank you!
Thanks a lot for sharing such a good source with all, i appreciate your efforts taken for the same. I found this worth sharing and must share this with all.
Great article as knowing degrade the pages that interest us and give potential that if they help us position the whole
Hey Rand,
We're actually having this exact problem. Although the page that is ranking instead of our desired page is simply a map hosted within an iframe. It has no text or keywords, but still rank instead of the page we'd prefer, which does contain our specified keywords!
Any advice on this? Perhaps it's a links issue although GWT (Search Console) doesn't show the map page as having more links.
Thanks Rand,
Alex
More links might not be the issue - could just be "better" links or "more relevant links" in Google's eyes (and remember, they're not perfect at this). Auditing those internal links to see what they say and where they point is a good start, but you might consider the redirect and recreate tactic if nothing you do on internal links moves the needle.
Good vid Rand. We see this quite a lot with our ecommerce sites. We sometimes see Google 'hunting' for the correct page, picking a different one on an almost daily basis. The simplest and quickest solution for this is to make a list of all of the incorrect pages and then on each one place a link containing some of the keyword in the anchor. Yes, anchor rich keywords still work and are fine for internal usage such as this if done within reason.
Yeah - we've seen some success with internal anchors, but there are plenty of times that alone doesn't do the trick and more drastic action (like what I suggest in the video) is needed.
Hi Rand,
Thanks for the great post.
Example- If the home page is ranking for keywords other than the optimized pages.
How to fix such problems.
Hello Rand, what one can do if index page is indexing in SERP for targeted keyword and not landing page . Because my index page ranking for other keywords also.
Great topic, something every SEO can definitely relate to. Always feels risky 'demoting' a page but sometimes it has to be done!
Good article, i have seen cases that some pages are ranking higher cause on their sitemap structure.... the op pages are more visible to the crawler than the ones located deep in the sitemap.
Cheers.
So many sites suffer with this problem. Degrading and internal linking has always netted me the best results, topped off with a healthy dose of fresh content.
Excellent WBF Rand :-)
-Andy
Thank you, I believe this is a topic everyone has seen happening on their site! I really like step 3 idea but have doubts on it:
I think the best strategy to follow would be to work on steps 1 &2 and only work on 3 if the relevant page is already showing high and everything indicates it could outrank the "wrong one". But I am not sure if this is possible or Google may not let it get high for as long as the "wrong one" is there.
One extra possibility may be to simply work on improve the wrong page and get it to the very top and work on making conversion possible (without deterioritating converstion for what it should actually convert)
It just depends on your goals and what you're willing to sacrifice. Sometimes, having the right page rank is worth the degradation of another page. Other times, it's not. You have to decide as the SEO on the site what's best for the long term.
Nice Post! Can you explain for me difference b/w temporary and permanent redirection.
That's a great solution. Thanks for it and showing us the solution.
Hey Rand,
People using it 301 redirect to solve www and non www web version to avoid better analytic result. You are saying that google will say that this is a similar page. Isn't it affect www or non www web version? If not, why?
Regards,
Sabih
A while ago our company (enterprise) published a report for 2016 on a new landing page. A lot of people were searching for the terms and our 2013 and 2014 reports were showing up first and the 2016 one was showing up fifth-sixth! What we did: 1. 302 temporary redirect from the old reports to the new ones. 2. Optimized the new report page to have the exact keywords that people were looking for + added the date of the report more clearly. 3. Optimized the meta description the same way. 4. ??? 5. Profit! After a couple of days, the correct report was ranking first so we were able to take the 302 off.
It make a lot of sense as topic but i think degrading work the well as well as the hvaing new page and taking off the any relevant filters.
Hi Rand,
Thanks for the great tips/insights. This illustrates a common problem with people working on these pages, both in B2C and B2B: Instead of asking why the desired pages aren't ranking, the key is to take a very long, very hard look at why the other pages *ARE* ranking. Thanks again for a providing a great road map to tackle the issue.
Hi Rand,
Nice topic on this week whiteboard Friday. This is the very serious case and it occurs when you do not have possibly the relevant page for the search query the user needs. As according to the QDF (query deserves freshness) you have updated knowledge in your website regarding every product and even every query a visitor can search for. If you have the relevant URL and relevant landing page with the most relevant content. So it is not only good for your website architecture and URL Structure but also great for the people visiting your website and they returned much happily after getting the most right stuff for the search query they made for.
Sometimes it also happens that you are having two or more pages in search for one single keyword, as sometimes Google picks all the URLs in which the keyword is placed and in this way three URLS came up in your search which are probably the homepage, about us page and then the relevant landing page the user typed the query for.
Good topic!!!
Yeah - QDF can sometimes be a pain for this, ranking a "fresh" page that's not as relevant rather than the right one that is. Giving Google a bit of time to settle down on the freshness boost can make sense so you're not wasting effort (though, when a fresh boost is given, it can mean there's a spike in searches, which might make it even more important to get the right page ranking).
Very good way to test if a page jumps in rank when they get a bunch of new traffic. Pretty sneaky... :-)
I am confused if I rank my products page, but the rank for keywords is my site's news page, should I need to do some change?
Hi Rand!!!
I think that does not happen all .... we are always positioned a less important page or worse, we are positioned for having used a keyword that is not adequate.
But as you well say, it is to figure out where is the problem, create a page with appropriate content and degrade the old page. That simple
Good weekend !!!
hi rand,
it was simply superb, actually few days back i faced this situation, so now i can handle that in feature. thank you..................
nice blog
Best piece of informative content
Hi Rand.
I never knew there was such a thing as wrong page ranking. Thank you for sharing.
Regards
Hey, it's very common. I saw it on many websites. At least 2-3 keywords have usually this wrong page ranking problem.
nice post.....we have also lots of solution for this problem.........
http://goo.gl/yyHp1W
Dunno why you're trying to plug your business on this page...
Great One! As always.
Thanks, good article!