Google doesn't rank the best page of our content for keywords. How to fix that?

[jgenesto]

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

[Adam.Whittles]

Hi Julien, I just did a basic check of your backlink profile using opensiteexplorer.org

[jgenesto]

Doh! I guess I googled the wrong terms! Thanks for the link...

[jgenesto]

It does help a ton! What tool did you use for this analysis? I'll try to use the same techniques and then optimize each page accordingly!

Thanks

[Adam.Whittles]

Hi Julien,

Having looked at the backlink profile for both pages I can already see one problem. Your 'Annecy' page has very few links pointing to it whereas your 'Haute-Savoie' page has considerably more links to it. This is not a major problem in itself, however the problem I can see is with the anchors of these links. The majority of links to your 'Haute-Savoie' page contain the anchor 'haute savoie annecy'. This could be contributing to your 'Haute-Savoie' page outranking your 'Annecy' page. You can combat this by creating more links to your 'Annecy' page.

You could also improve your on-page optimisation for both pages. Again, having looked at your 'Haute-Savoie' page, it is quite well optimised for 'Annecy' rather than 'Haute-Savoie'.

Hope this helps,

Adam.

[KeriMorgret]

Rand wrote a post about this at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions that may help you out.