Google Ranking Wrong Page
-
The company I work for started with a website targeting one city. Soon after I started SEO for them, they expanded to two cities. Optimization was challenging, but we managed to rank highly in both cities for our keywords.
A year or so later, the company expanded to two new locations, so now 4 total. At the time, we realized it was going to be tough to rank any one page for four different cities, so our new SEO strategy was to break the website into 5 sections or minisites consisting of 4 city-targeted sites, and our original site which will now be branded as more of a national website.
Our URL structures now look something like this:
www.company.com
www.company.com/city-1
www.company.com/city-2
www.company.com/city-3
www.company.com.city-4Now, in the present time, all is going well except for our original targeted city. The problem is that Google keeps ranking our original site (which is now national) instead of the new city-specific site we created. I realize that this is probably due to all of the past SEO we did optimizing for that city.
My thoughts are that Google is confused as to which page to actually rank for this city's keyword terms and I was wondering if canonical tags would be a possible solution here, since the pages are about 95% identical.
Anyone have any insight? I'd really appreciate it!
-
You are welcome Chris. Good luck and let us know when it starts showing the right way around!
-
Many thanks, Dana. What you described was pretty much my gut instinct as to what was going on. The funny thing is that all rankings look fine on Bing and Yahoo, go figure, haha.
-Chris
-
I'm not sure that a canonical tag is going to effectively solve the problem. Also, if implemented, it would completely undermine your original homepage. I don't think you are going to want to do that.
Have you analyzed your inbound links and the anchor text associated with it? It's quite probable that you attracted a number of inbound links that contain anchor text specific to your original city and that this is a big contributing factor to the "national" page outranking the "city" page for said "city." While not impossible to address, trying to get the folks who are linking to you to update their links may not be productive either.
The one thing you can control is how you are linking internally and what anchor text is pointing to what page. I think if you send enough signals from your own pages that this new "city" minisite is the right and best location for people searching for information or products pertaining to that city, eventually it will bump up ahead of the other page.
THis could take a good amount of time. Depending on how long the original page had to build up its links and authority, it probably will take at least that long, and maybe quite a big longer to build up the same kind of authority on the new page.
I know this isn't probably the definitive answer you're looking for, but I really do think that this one is a matter of time, effort and patience.
Dana
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
-
Does you page need to be unique to rank
What I mean by unique is : Let's imagine I want to rank one "seo ranking factors." In order to compete do I need to have (in terms of design) that is totally different than everything out there or can I rank with a page that is presented in a very similar way than everything out there but with different content. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Page not being ranked properly
Hi, Wondering if someone could possibly shed some light on why some of our pages are not being ranked properly on Google. For example this page https://www.mypetzilla.co.uk/dog-breeds Keyword "Dog Breeds" we can't be found on and we are absolutely baffled why? Could it be that we are listing all 100 and something dog breeds on one page? Should we introduce pagination or load more as user scrolls down. This page has been up for at least 4 years. Any suggestion or advice would be much appreciated. Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mypetzilla0 -
Page rank and menus
Hi, My client has a large website and has a navigation with main categories. However, they also have a hamburger type navigation in the top right. If you click it it opens to a massive menu with every category and page visible. Do you know if having a navigation like this bleeds page rank? So if all deep pages are visible from the hamburger navigation this means that page rank is not being conserved to the main categories. If you click a main category in the main navigation (not the hamburger) you can see the sub pages. I think this is the right structure but the client has installed this huge menu to make it easier for people to see what there is. From a technical SEO is this not bad?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AL123al0 -
How to 301 Redirect /page.php to /page, after a RewriteRule has already made /page.php accessible by /page (Getting errors)
A site has its URLs with php extensions, like this: example.com/page.php I used the following rewrite to remove the extension so that the page can now be accessed from example.com/page RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rcseo
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [L] It works great. I can access it via the example.com/page URL. However, the problem is the page can still be accessed from example.com/page.php. Because I have external links going to the page, I want to 301 redirect example.com/page.php to example.com/page. I've tried this a couple of ways but I get redirect loops or 500 internal server errors. Is there a way to have both? Remove the extension and 301 the .php to no extension? By the way, if it matters, page.php is an actual file in the root directory (not created through another rewrite or URI routing). I'm hoping I can do this, and not just throw a example.com/page canonical tag on the page. Thanks!0 -
Ranking dynamic landing pages
I have a client and I'm working on a project with their development team. We're creating dynamic landing pages populated with their lead data. Similar to the style of linkedin. For example, someone searches for "demand generation manager" and one of our pages with contact information (some) shows up in the search results. www.leadgenius.com/demandgenerationjobs (or something like that. we have yet to flesh this out). We're also looking into different backlinking strategies to support optimizing the above mentioned pages in addition to their new site launching this month. What is the best way to optimize the dynamic pages as well as the main site in tandem or independently?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Intergen0 -
How can I export SEOmoz ranking reports to google spreadsheet
How can I export SEOmoz website rankings to Google Spreadsheet? I have applied other SEOmoz API's and Google Spreadsheet combos effectively but cannot find anything online for this. I would like to display current ranking and ranking history for specific keywords in Google Spreadsheet and have them update automatically using the SEOmoz API.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael_Rock0 -
Ranking drop for a particular page on a particular keyword
Take a look at centerforhealthysex.com/sex-addiction. For months we were ranking in the top 3 spots with this URL for "sex addiction los angeles", even reaching #1 for a while. Late last year we redesigned and developed the site to clean up the code and redirects. We also cleaned up the internal linking structure. For years we had been ranking on "sex addiction los angeles" for the home page ... bumping around the top 5 spots, but we wanted organic traffic to go to /sex-addiction. In the Fall, we saw overall site traffic rise steadily. We made few changes to the site and none to this page or links flowing back to the page once we had achieved strong ranking -- we didn't want to mess with a good thing. Then November 27th we started losing ranking on this term and a couple others. The good news is that we gained ranking on some high volume traffic terms so overall organic traffic is reasonably strong, BUT we're not ranking on the terms where we want to rank. Centerforhealthysex.com/sex-addiction is now nowhere to be found on the target search term despite fairly strong page rank. I tried redoing and resubmitting the site map, cleaning out some potentially duplicative content but to no avail. I see no issues, errors or warnings in Webmaster Tools. We have a few medium priority fixer-uppers in SEO Moz, but we've taken care of the majority of the big stuff. What am I not seeing? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joshuakrafchin0 -
Should I prevent Google from indexing blog tag and category pages?
I am working on a website that has a regularly updated Wordpress blog and am unsure whether or not the category and tag pages should be indexable. The blog posts are often outranked by the tag and category pages and they are ultimately leaving me with a duplicate content issue. With this in mind, I assumed that the best thing to do would be to remove the tag and category pages from the index, but after speaking to someone else about the issue, I am no longer sure. I have tried researching online, but there isn't anything that provided any further information. Please can anyone with any experience of dealing with issues like this or with any knowledge of the topic help me to resolve this annoying issue. Any input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulRogers0