Wrong page ranked in Google, specific example
-
Hi All,
I've searched for previous questions and many talk about the same problem but do not post an actual example. I am also thinking to do a blog post and a series of experiments once there is a theory.
My target keyword is "Exhibition Stand Hire" and this is the target page on our site http://goo.gl/qt54lb
Site appears on page 6 of SERPS (google.co.uk), but instead of this page a homepage is listed.
But if I'm searching for the term using quotes, ie "Exhibition Stand Hire" the right page appears on page 4 of the SERPs.
Our home page only uses the keyword in the body text, while target page is very optimised. Could it be over-optimised? I've tried mixing up words in the title tag to not offer an exact match, also i've varied the anchor text of all incoming links but that didn't fix the problem. (Hence why at the moment they all use different terms to point to this page) None of this helped alter what page is chosen to appear.
Is it simply the matter of page not being strong enough compared to other less relevant pages on the site? How come many other sites rank better with much less effort? (i'm using OSE to determine competition)
Thank you.
-
Thanks for your answer Jane. The competition is a mix of some sites being very small and more targeted then us, and some less strong domains doing better. I guess this highlights the importance of not having too many narrow pages which end up being weak.
Before the homepage started to rank, there was another wrong page ranking in a similar way until i removed the wording from it also, in the effort to make the correct page show, but looks like google just goes up to the next strong candidate.
-
Hi George,
My first thought would be that the internal page doesn't have enough authority - from what I can see from OSE, it has no links from third party sources, only internal links: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.exhibithire.co.uk%2Fexhibition-services%2Fexhibition-stand-hire%2F&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=&target=page&group=1
This isn't to say that some sites rank internal pages that have no third party inbound links, but they're generally very strong domains to begin with, e.g. a site like Debenhams having an internal page about (say) pink swimsuits ranking for [pink swimsuits]. I made this example up, checked, and indeed Debenhams does rank for that query, and the page has no inbound third party links. But it's on debenhams.com, and that's the "trick".
What does your competition look like? The domain itself only has a 29/100 domain authority, which can be fine in an uncrowded market but might not be enough for internal links to extent much authority to the desired page. Your home page is also pretty darn relevant to the original query: the site itself is about exhibition hiring, and you mention "stand" once on the home page where that text does not link elsewhere. I would say that the combination of the home page being very relevant for the query and the internal page not having high enough authority are causing this to happen.
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
-
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Hello, We have magento 2 extensions website mageants.com since 1 years google every 15 days cached my all pages but suddenly last 15 days my websites pages not cached by google showing me 404 error so go search console check error but din't find any error so I have cached manually fetch and render but still most of pages have same 404 error example page : - https://www.mageants.com/free-gift-for-magento-2.html error :- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&rlz=1C1CHBD_enIN803IN804&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1569j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 so have any one solutions for this issues
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore0 -
Home Page Deindexed Only at Google after Recovering from Hack Attack
Hello, Facing a Strange issue, wordpress blog hghscience[dot]com was hacked by someone, when checked, I found index.php file was changed & it was showing some page with a hacked message, & also index.html file was added to the cpanel account.All pages were showing same message, when I found it, I replaced index.php to default wordpress index.php file & deleted index.htmlI could not find any other file which was looking suspicious. Site started working fine & it was also indexed but cached version was that hacked page. I used webmaster tool to fetch & render it as google bot & submitted for indexing. After that I noticed home page get deindexed by google. Rest all pages are indexing like before. Site was hacked around 30th July & I fixed it on 1st Aug. Since then home page is not getting indexed, I tried to fetch & index multiple time via google webmasters tool but no luck as of now. 1 More thing I Noticed, When I used info:mysite.com on google, its showing some other hacked site ( www.whatsmyreferer.com/ ) When Searching from India But when same info:mysite.com is searched from US a different hacked site is showing ( sigaretamogilev.by )However when I search "mysite.com" my site home page is appearing on google search but when I check cached URL its showing hacked sites mentioned above.As per my knowledge I checked all SEO Plugins, Codes of homepage, can't find anything which is not letting the homepage indexed.PS: webmaster tool has received no warning etc for penalty or malware. I also noticed I disallowed index.php file via robots.txt earlier but now I even removed that. 7Dj1Q0w.png 3krfp9K.png
Technical SEO | | killthebillion0 -
We lost ranking for balers keywords for sinobaler.com site, What could be wrong?
From recent marketing, I have checked the backlinks droped down a lot, and some main keywords ranking also drop. How can fix this issue?
Technical SEO | | SINOBALER_Baler0 -
Will Google Also Penalize Desktop Rankings If Your Site is Not Mobile Friendly?
Apologies if this question has already been answered. I was unable to find it. For desktop organic rankings: Will Google take into consideration mobile-readiness as a ranking factor? Thanks in advance for any reply, Kind regards,
Technical SEO | | Eric_Lifescript
Eric Darby1 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Severe Drops in Google UK rankings
Hi Guys, I'm Chris - SEO Noob & appointed website man @ www.customdesignedcable.co.uk I signed up to SEO moz at the end of February and i have slowly but surely been trying to implement the on-page optimisation suggestions with my selected keywords against the appropriate pages. Since i have done this, our pages are still ranking but no where near what they were at before. Out of 70 keywords, we've gone from at least 60+ pages on the first page down to 20+ and the number in the top three has dropped from 55 to 33. Obviously i'm no seo guru far far from it but all of the changes that have been suggested i have adhered to and the result is the exact opposite of what i was hoping for and expecting. I'm after some advice as to how to use seomoz to target my keywords to google primarily to get these page rankings back. Should i just upload backup copies of the site? How would you suggest that i move forward to try and achieve at least similar rankings to what i had previously? Any help is much appreciated as most of our enquiries come from the internet and it has almost completely dried up these last couple of months. Thanks Guys! Chris. P.S. Would redesigning the site look, layout and feel with the same content negatively affect seo? Also, as a completely separate question, how come sites with content that is a lot worse than ours rank higher for the same keywords as ours? Thanks Again
Technical SEO | | Chris_CDC0 -
Frequent updating of pages on website to rank better
Will updating each page often for example everyday or few days, rank the page and/or website better in google. The reason I ask is that I made 18 websites about three months ago and the traffic initially was alot higher and has fallen little by little thru the 3 months. Also how well my pages rank has also fallen. I just put out the websites, have done nothing else. No linking, etc. No updates. It is evident that without new links coming in, the website will fall in rank ie., link aquistion velocity But my question is if I update the pages and change content frequently will this improve my position in google and other search engines. The traffic on websites over the three months if graphed sort of looks like a stair case going down.
Technical SEO | | mickey110 -
Why does our page show a description in english in google spain?
Hi! We have a multilingual page and I have set in Google Webmaster Tools the language preference for the root domain to be none, Spanish for the .com/es, English for the .com/en, and German for the .com/de. The title and description show in the right language in Google Germany and google UK, but in google.es (Spain) the title and description appear in English instead of Spanish. Does anybody know why could this be happening and how to fix it? kJtF3.png
Technical SEO | | inmonova0