Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to get Google to index another page
-
Hi,
I will try to make my question clear, although it is a bit complex.
For my site the most important keyword is "Insurance" or at least the danish variation of this.
My problem is that Google are'nt indexing my frontpage on this, but are indexing a subpage - www.mydomain.dk/insurance instead of www.mydomain.dk.
My link bulding will be to subpages and to my main domain, but i wont be able to get that many links to www.mydomain.dk/insurance.
So im interested in making my frontpage the page that is my main page for the keyword insurance, but without just blowing the traffic im getting from the subpage at the moment.
Is there any solutions to do this?
Thanks in advance.
-
Hi Kate,
Thanks for your reply, im glad for yours and all others contribution, it really make me reflect on which direction i should choose.
The whole page is an insurance page, but there is many different things you can do, you can buy insurance, calculate prize, make a claim and so on, so the frontpage has many purposes.
The reason why i want to be ranked on the frontpage, is because it converts better, and im sure i can get it ranked higher, in the long run, because of the link building oppertunities i have on that page.
So right now, it maybe would preferrebly to focus on /insurance, but in the long run i think the frontpage will be stronger.
It's also important for me to underline, that im a part of a big company, and its not entirely up to me to decide changes and etc. on the homepage.
-
Keith and Bryan are dead on. If your homepage is better for users looking for insurance, then why is there an insurance page? My guess is because your site offers more than insurance.
Yes, getting links to the homepage will be easier, but that should not be the reason for killing a well ranking page that seems to be the better page. I'd recommend updating the insurance page to make it convert like the homepage and let it remain the focus of insurance traffic. Then make sure that your homepage links to the insurance page with good anchor text, and that it doesn't link to another page with any insurance related text.
-
Hi,
Thank you, and all other, for your replies - it's very helpful.
The reason i want the traffic on the frontpage is the following:
-
It's alot easier for me to get link juice to the frontpage, at the moment we havent been working focused with link building, but when we start doing that, it will be alot easier to get links to the frontpage.
-
Im quite sure the frontpage is a better landing page for this traffic than the /insurance page, so the conversion rates and etc. will be better on the frontpage.
-
-
Again, my advise would be the same as Bryan's - leave it alone and build more links to the insurance page.
I don't see a problem with that page out ranking your home page?
-
Rel canonical will kill the insurance page, likely not the best idea!
-
I don't advise 301 redirecting /insurance as it looks to me like it is very strong. It will lose most of its link juice when redirected. Rather optimise your homepage with the desired keyword. Google chooses the most relevant page which is why /insurance is showing up for insurance. As it should! Don't worry about your home page, rather link to the /insurance page and your entire domain will gain strength over time. Actually the deep linked /insurance page will likely get stronger quicker than trying to get the home page stronger.
Once you link all everything to the home page it will eventually get stronger so long as it contains Insurance in the title and is optimised for this word.
-
I would either use rel canonical as Nakul instructed above, although this is a bit of hack IMO.
Or just build some better quality links at the page you want to rank, I don't see a problem with building links to the /insurance page?
-
If that's the case, I would suggest doing a rel=canonical tag on www.tryg.dk/forsikring to your homepage. Essentially, it's like a 301 for search engines but not for the users. The users will be able to come to your homepage, use navigation and or other links to visit www.tryg.dk/forsikring or they can come from external links which are linking to www.tryg.dk/forsikring. But Google will de-index that page and rank the homepage instead.
I hope that helps. The exact canonical tag you would use on www.tryg.dk/forsikring page would be :
-
Hi Keith,
the page is www.tryg.dk and it is ranked, i just want it to rank on keyword "insurance" as well, as the link building oppertunities on that page is alot better than on www.tryg.dk/forsikring.
A 301 redirect wont work, since i still want people to be able to access www.tryg.dk/forsikring.
-
Hi, the domain is www.tryg.dk and it is cached and indexed in Google.
Because of the possibilities to link build to my main page, i would like to optimize that to the keyword "Insurance", and that process i could start right away.
My question is if there is any possibility to get Google to "understand" this, or i has to work my way up with my main page, whilst i stop focus on www.tryg.dk/forsikringer - that is at this moment the page getting the highest ranking on "insurance".
-
I suspect his home page is just not ranking for the keywords, could you post the URL in question?
If not then type
_site:www.yourdomain.com _
Into Google and let us know if your site is listed.
Thanks,
-
are you saying your homepage is not indexed/cached in Google ? If that's the case, there might be something wrong. There might be a noindex tag, some sort of a disallow to your homepage. Personally, I can't remember seeing a similar scenario where inner pages are indexed and the homepage is not. If it's not ranking but is cached, that's another issue.
Please confirm.
-
Optimise your home page for your chosen keyword and 301 the page /insurance to your root domain.
To do this you need to create a .htaccess file in the / directory on your server and enter the following information.
Redirect 301 /insurance http://www.mydomain.dk
About 90% of the link juice "should" flow through if you use a 301 redirect, you can test the above is working by visting http://www.mydomain.dk/insurance and making sure it redirect you to your home page.
Note that a 301 can take a few weeks (possibly longer) for Google to pick up so do not expect overnight changes.
Hope that 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
-
Google keeps marking different pages as duplicates
My website has many pages like this: mywebsite/company1/valuation mywebsite/company2/valuation mywebsite/company3/valuation mywebsite/company4/valuation ... These pages describe the valuation of each company. These pages were never identical but initially, I included a few generic paragraphs like what is valuation, what is a valuation model, etc... in all the pages so some parts of these pages' content were identical. Google marked many of these pages as duplicated (in Google Search Console) so I modified the content of these pages: I removed those generic paragraphs and added other information that is unique to each company. As a result, these pages are extremely different from each other now and have little similarities. Although it has been more than 1 month since I made the modification, Google still marks the majority of these pages as duplicates, even though Google has already crawled their new modified version. I wonder whether there is anything else I can do in this situation? Thanks
Technical SEO | | TuanDo96270 -
Should search pages be indexed?
Hey guys, I've always believed that search pages should be no-indexed but now I'm wondering if there is an argument to index them? Appreciate any thoughts!
Technical SEO | | RebekahVP0 -
Fake Links indexing in google
Hello everyone, I have an interesting situation occurring here, and hoping maybe someone here has seen something of this nature or be able to offer some sort of advice. So, we recently installed a wordpress to a subdomain for our business and have been blogging through it. We added the google webmaster tools meta tag and I've noticed an increase in 404 links. I brought this up to or server admin, and he verified that there were a lot of ip's pinging our server looking for these links that don't exist. We've combed through our server files and nothing seems to be compromised. Today, we noticed that when you do site:ourdomain.com into google the subdomain with wordpress shows hundreds of these fake links, that when you visit them, return a 404 page. Just curious if anyone has seen anything like this, what it may be, how we can stop it, could it negatively impact us in anyway? Should we even worry about it? Here's the link to the google results. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amshowells.com&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58.1905j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 (odd links show up on pages 2-3+)
Technical SEO | | mshowells0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
De-indexing millions of pages - would this work?
Hi all, We run an e-commerce site with a catalogue of around 5 million products. Unfortunately, we have let Googlebot crawl and index tens of millions of search URLs, the majority of which are very thin of content or duplicates of other URLs. In short: we are in deep. Our bloated Google-index is hampering our real content to rank; Googlebot does not bother crawling our real content (product pages specifically) and hammers the life out of our servers. Since having Googlebot crawl and de-index tens of millions of old URLs would probably take years (?), my plan is this: 301 redirect all old SERP URLs to a new SERP URL. If new URL should not be indexed, add meta robots noindex tag on new URL. When it is evident that Google has indexed most "high quality" new URLs, robots.txt disallow crawling of old SERP URLs. Then directory style remove all old SERP URLs in GWT URL Removal Tool This would be an example of an old URL:
Technical SEO | | TalkInThePark
www.site.com/cgi-bin/weirdapplicationname.cgi?word=bmw&what=1.2&how=2 This would be an example of a new URL:
www.site.com/search?q=bmw&category=cars&color=blue I have to specific questions: Would Google both de-index the old URL and not index the new URL after 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL (which is noindexed) as described in point 2 above? What risks are associated with removing tens of millions of URLs directory style in GWT URL Removal Tool? I have done this before but then I removed "only" some useless 50 000 "add to cart"-URLs.Google says themselves that you should not remove duplicate/thin content this way and that using this tool tools this way "may cause problems for your site". And yes, these tens of millions of SERP URLs is a result of a faceted navigation/search function let loose all to long.
And no, we cannot wait for Googlebot to crawl all these millions of URLs in order to discover the 301. By then we would be out of business. Best regards,
TalkInThePark0 -
Google Cache is not showing in my page
Hello Everyone, I have issue in my Page, My category page (http://www.bannerbuzz.com/custom-vinyl-banners.html) is regular cached in past, but before sometime it can't show the cached result in SERP and not show in cached result , I have also fetch this link in google web master, but can't get the result, it is showing following message. 404. That’s an error. The requested URL /search?q=cache%3A http%3A//www.bannerbuzz.com/custom-vinyl-banners.html was not found on this server. That’s all we know. My category page rank is 2 and its keyword is on first in google.com, so i am little bit worried about this page cache issue, Can someone please tell me why is this happening? Is this a temporary issue? Help me to solve out this cache issue and once again my page will regularly cache in future. Thanks
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Blank pages in Google's webcache
Hello all, Is anybody experiencing blanck page's in Google's 'Cached' view? I'm seeing just the page background and none of the content for a couple of my pages but when I click 'View Text Only' all of teh content is there. Strange! I'd love to hear if anyone else is experiencing the same. Perhaps this is something to do with the roll out of Google's updates last week?! Thanks,
Technical SEO | | A_Q
Elias0 -
Does Google index XML files?
Does Google or other search engines include XML files in their index? More specifically, I am wondering how Google knows the difference between an xml filetype and an RSS feed.
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0
