What would cause the wrong category page to come up?
-
I am trying to figure out why the wrong thing is coming up in the serps. For example, we are trying to rank for used widgets. But when you type in used widgets in google the primary widget page doesn't come up, one of the secondary categories under used widgets comes up. What would cause this? What are things I should check?
-
Is it possible for you to give a clearer description of the categories? You say they are different products but that one is a second category of the other
Does the page you want to rank show up for any other searches? In your analytics are you getting any traffic from Google to that page?
-
I did the site search that you suggest- site:www.site.com widgets and it was in the correct order.
When I added the word used to the search it came up in the wrong order. They both have the word used, used the same amount of time. It makes no sense to me.
-
They actually are two separate types of items so I don't think I can canonical because I still want people to find the other category if that is what they are looking for. The names are so similar it is a problem.
I have an x category, y category, and xy category. Even though the names are the same, they are very different products.
-
Hi,
The best way I find to see what the search engines thinks is the best page from your site for a term is to do a site search with the term you are checking.
E.g.
site:yousite.com + Term
In your case : yousite.com + used widgets
This shows you the pages in order that Googles ranks them. Also its a good way to identify duplicated title tags.
Now there is an article published by Rand Fishkin on this issue to know what could be the possible reason to showing wrong category pages and how you can correct them .Please check once below article
http://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions
I hope it helps
Thanks
-
You could use a canonical tag to tell google which page is the desired page. Unless the other page also had targeted key terms on it. Then I would avoid the canonical tag and try to find a better way to optimize the other page for key terms not so closely related.
-
It is unfortunate, but they have almost the exact same name. I don't know how to differentiate them.
-
These titles are so close that google is probably flipping a coin.
-
For the term "used widget" ,the title for the page I want to rank is "used widget for sale". For the page I do not want it to rank for this term it is "used widget - type for sale".
-
It It has breadcrumbs and it shows the category in the level up mechanism for the category sort.
-
What are things I should check?
Proofread the title tags. Be sure that the one that you want to rank is the best optimized.
-
it can be that both pages are semantically similar and the robot is not sure which one from both should it rank
You could try to create an internal link in secondary category "url" to the url you want to rank, using the keyword as anchor. It may 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
-
Multiple pages for a Profile
Hi All, We have a Biography website in which we have Celebrity News, Videos, Images etc. We have a main page which shows the biography and sides we show 5 blocks of News, Videos, Images etc and have a More option when clicked the page goes to a page where it shows 100's of news of that celeb or Videos etc This is the main page : sitename.com/celebrityname news: sitename.com/celebrityname/news Videos: sitename.com/celebrityname/videos Images: sitename.com/celebrityname/Images Now these 3 pages have no content in them and when we scan via SEMRUSH it shows as "with duplicate title tags". We have 20K such bio's so 20K * 3 such pages is 60K duplicate title tags How can we deal with such pages? Any help please. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leengsro870 -
Ranking for homepage & category page?
We lost our Google organic ranking (position 1 - 3) for our highest converting key phrase (cotton tees) in February. The ranking was for our homepage (brandname.com) which is very image heavy and doesn't have much readable content. We noticed that all of our competitors are ranking above us for their category page, not their homepage. The difference between us and our competitors is that we specialize in this key phrase and they just offer one category of the key phrase. For example, we only sell cotton tee's and they sell cotton tees, handbags and shoes. When we dropped we noticed that Google began showing our homepage AND category page in the results, so we pointed our brandname.com to brandname.com/cotton-tees canonically. The idea was that this would assure that the homepage and category page were not competing with each other. The homepage was not really optimized for cotton tees so we thought this might help. 1. Is there any harm in removing the canonical and allowing both pages to rank? (We're also working on redesigning the homepage to add more readable text & optimize for cotton tees.) 2. Our homepage URL used to be "brandname.com/cotton-tees" and we consistenly ranked between 1 and 3 for cotton tees during that time. We modified the homepage URL because it seemed spammy and are now just "brandname.com". Does it make sense to go back to the URL with the key phrase in it if that is our main product and we want to rank for it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
301'd an important, ranking page to the wrong new page, any recourse?
Our 1,300 page site conversion from static html to Wordpress platform went flawlessly with the exception of 1 significant issue....an old, important, highly ranking page was 301 redirected to the wrong corresponding new page. The page it was redirected to is about a similar product, but not the same. This was an oversight that slipped through. It was brought to my attention when I noticed this new page was still holding the old page's rankings but the bounce rate skyrocketed (clearly because the content on the wrong new page was not relevant). Once identified, we cleaned up the redirect. My fear is that all the juice built up on the old .html page that ranked well has now permanently been passed to an irrelevant, insignificant page. -Is there any way to clean up this mistake? -Is there anything I can do to assist Google in associating the correct 'new' page with correct 'old' page after the wrong redirect was initially set-up? -Am I going to have to start from scratch with the new page in terms of trust, backlinks, etc. since google already noted the redirect? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen0 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
Category Pages For Distributing Authority But Not Creating Duplicate Content
I read this interesting moz guide: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt, which I think answered my question but I just want to make sure. I take it to mean that if I have category pages with nothing but duplicate content (lists of other pages (h1 title/on-page description and links to same) and that I still want the category pages to distribute their link authority to the individual pages, then I should leave the category pages in the site map and meta noindex them, rather than robots.txt them. Is that correct? Again, don't want the category pages to index or have a duplicate content issue, but do want the category pages to be crawled enough to distribute their link authority to individual pages. Given the scope of the site (thousands of pages and hundreds of categories), I just want to make sure I have that right. Up until my recent efforts on this, some of the category pages have been robot.txt'd out and still in the site map, while others (with different url structure) have been in the sitemap, but not robots.txt'd out. Thanks! Best.. Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
What's the best way to redirect categories & paginated pages on a blog?
I'm currently re-doing my blog and have a few categories that I'm getting rid of for housecleaning purposes and crawl efficiency. Each of these categories has many pages (some have hundreds). The new blog will also not have new relevant categories to redirect them to (1 or 2 may work). So what is the best place to properly redirect these pages to? And how do I handle the paginated URLs? The only logical place I can think of would be to redirect them to the homepage of the blog, but since there are so many pages, I don't know if that's the best idea. Does anybody have any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kking41200 -
Internal page ranking
If I have a domain: Example.com I want this domain to rank for several keywords. I build a page on the domain called Example.com/glasses If I SEO the page Example.com/glasses with backlinks etc... will that URL come up on google or will it simply bring Example.com up on the SERPS. If I have three keywords, should I make a subpage for each page and SEO that page? Will that make the domain rank for all three keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JML11790 -
Will Google Visit Non-Canonicalized Page Again and Return Its Page's Original Ranking?
I have 2 questions about canonicalization. 1. Will Google ever visit Page A again if after it has been canonicalized to Page B? 2. If Google will still visit Page A and found that it is not canonicalizing to Page B already, will the original rankings and traffic of Page A returned to the way before it's canonicalized? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalsources.com0