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.
Help! The website ranks fine but one of my web pages simply won't rank on Google!!!
-
One of our web pages will not rank on Google. The website as a whole ranks fine except just one section...We have tested and it looks fine...Google can crawl the page no problem. There are no spurious redirects in place. The content is fine. There is no duplicate page content issue. The page has a dozen product images (photos) but the load time of the page is absolutely fine. We have the submitted the page via webmaster and its fine. It gets listed but then a few hours later disappears!!! The site has not been penalised as we get good rankings with other pages. Can anyone help? Know about this problem?
-
Don't forget that every keyword is different - how you rank depends on what you're doing compared to other sites targeting that term, not just what you're doing on your own site. So some keywords just take a larger, higher-authority link profile to rank for than others. A good place to start with getting links for that page would be to look at the backlinks that other pages that rank for that term have - you may be able to get some links from the same or similar sites.
-
Thanks again!!!
We have just implemented a site footer with keyword targeting the relevant pages. I thought this alone - along with the top navigation, copy (which is 265 words...) would give google enough guidance. But its not!! External links we have just started to do - but I admit - really just started. I was trying in desperation to get the pages right first 
Do you think more link would help? We will try adding more copy...... The weird thing is - other pages on the site rank fine - including the homepage for the right keywords!!! -
Ah OK, thanks for the clarification!
That problem, to me, sounds like you need some links! In general when Google is ranking your home page for a term, instead of the page that is actually about that term, it's because they recognize that your site has some topical relevance for that term, but the individual page doesn't seem that important based on how many links are pointing to it. Are there ways you can flow some additional internal link juice to that page? Are there sites that are linking to your home page right now that are very closely related to the topic of the page in question, that you could ask to point to that page instead? Are there topically-related sites that don't link to that page right now that you could possibly get a link from? All of these will beef up your page authority, which should help.
In terms of your copy being too far down on the page - if you don't think it will negatively impact your user experience, you could try moving it up, or integrating it into the section with the images, but I don't know how much that will help. You also may need more copy on the page - if your page is 300 lines of code long, and only 5 of those lines are unique copy, it's hard to send a strong enough signal of relevance. Can you expand what you say on the page to make it a better resource on the topic at hand?
-
Thanks for the response! The right pages are not showing for the targeted keywords. The homepage is being ranked instead. Yet the homepage doesn't have the keywords represented on it. Google is taking the Dmoz description of the homepage and is using that to rank (for the targeted keywords)???
The pages do show on Google site: search and they do have images on them. Each page has six images on them. We have ensured the size of the images are ok. The copy on the page is at the bottom after the images - could this be an issue?
I have checked on Screaming Frog - nothing in particular stands out.
i know how we can stop google reading dmoz description which will be implemented....but I don't think this will resolve the issue....?
We have noticed - very strangely - the right page gets ranked - then google changes to the homepage????
Any suggestions... It's baffling me...
-
Is the problem that the page isn't appearing in the index, or that it isn't ranking for its target terms?
If the page has a lot of images but doesn't otherwise have much copy, it may be that Google is determining it to be too similar to other pages on your site and so is not displaying it. If it's not being indexed at all (doesn't show up in a site: search or when you search for a block of copy in quotations), double-check that your robots.txt isn't blocking it and that you don't have a meta robots noindex tag on the page. The suggestion of running Screaming Frog on your site to make sure a crawler can find the page is a good one - Screaming Frog will also tell you if the page is returning a weird HTTP status or is blocked by robots.
-
First think i would do is to check the url with Screaming Frog SEO Spider, anyway a link would be really helpful
-
Are you able to share a link to the page in question?
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
-
Should I optimize the login page? Will it affect the website SEO ranking?
I'm trying to resolve the site crawl issues that we have on our website. One of the links that has different issue types together is our login page. Currently we have two login pages that have the same content but different sub domains. **However I'm wondering if optimizing SEO on our login pages affects our website SEO ranking and if it's something better to do or not. ** To point out the details of the issues, the issue types that the logins pages have are "duplicate title", "duplicate content", "missing H1", "missing description", "thin content", "missing canonical tag" I'd appreciate your help, thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kaylie0 -
Should I apply Canonical Links from my Landing Pages to Core Website Pages?
I am working on an SEO project for the website: https://wave.com.au/ There are some core website pages, which we want to target for organic traffic, like this one: https://wave.com.au/doctors/medical-specialties/anaesthetist-jobs/ Then we have basically have another version that is set up as a landing page and used for CPC campaigns. https://wave.com.au/anaesthetists/ Essentially, my question is should I apply canonical links from the landing page versions to the core website pages (especially if I know they are only utilising them for CPC campaigns) so as to push link equity/juice across? Here is the GA data from January 1 - April 30, 2019 (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wavelength_International0 -
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 -
Is it still true that 3xx redirects don't cause you to lose any ranking?
In this: https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo it says that simply redirecting - provided you don't change anything on the page - isn't going to cost you rankings. Is this still true, or is there any new data/case studies that have been done since? I haven't seen anything updating it and just want to make sure because it's from 2016. We want to do simple 301 redirecting without any changes to the page. Or has anyone had an opposite experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AngieJohnston1 -
Do 403 Forbidden errors from website pages hurt rankings?
Hi All, I noticed that our website has lot of 403 errors across different pages using the tool http://www.deadlinkchecker.com/. Do these errors hurt website rankings? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Why is Google ranking irrelevant / not preferred pages for keywords?
Over the past few months we have been chipping away at duplicate content issues. We know this is our biggest issue and is working against us. However, it is due to this client also owning the competitor site. Therefore, product merchandise and top level categories are highly similar, including a shared server. Our rank is suffering major for this, which we understand. However, as we make changes, and I track and perform test searches, the pages that Google ranks for keywords never seems to match or make sense, at all. For example, I search for "solid scrub tops" and it ranks the "print scrub tops" category. Or the "Men Clearance" page is ranking for keyword "Women Scrub Pants". Or, I will search for a specific brand, and it ranks a completely different brand. Has anyone else seen this behavior with duplicate content issues? Or is it an issue with some other penalty? At this point, our only option is to test something and see what impact it has, but it is difficult to do when keywords do not align with content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lunavista-comm0 -
How do I get rel='canonical' to eliminate the trailing slash on my home page??
I have been searching high and low. Please help if you can, and thank you if you spend the time reading this. I think this issue may be affecting most pages. SUMMARY: I want to eliminate the trailing slash that is appended to my website. SPECIFIC ISSUE: I want www.threewaystoharems.com to showing up to users and search engines without the trailing slash but try as I might it shows up like www.threewaystoharems.com/ which is the canonical link. WHY? and I'm concerned my back-links to the link without the trailing slash will not be recognized but most people are going to backlink me without a trailing slash. I don't want to loose linkjuice from the people and the search engines not being in consensus about what my page address is. THINGS I"VE TRIED: (1) I've gone in my wordpress settings under permalinks and tried to specify no trailing slash. I can do this here but not for the home page. (2) I've tried using the SEO by yoast to set the canonical page. This would work if I had a static front page, but my front page is of blog posts and so there is no advanced page settings to set the canonical tag. (3) I'd like to just find the source code of the home page, but because it is CSS, I don't know where to find the reference. I have gone into the css files of my wordpress theme looking in header and index and everywhere else looking for a specification of what the canonical page is. I am not able to find it. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (4) Went into cpanel file manager looking for files that contain Canonical. I only found a file called canonical.php . the only thing that seemed like it was worth changing was changing line 139 from $redirect_url = home_url('/'); to $redirect_url = home_url(''); nothing happened. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (5) I have gone through the .htaccess file and put thes 4 lines at the top (didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) and then at the bottom of the file (also didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) : RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dillman
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?threewaystoharems.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://www.%1threewaystoharems.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] Please help friends.0 -
Does Google crawl the pages which are generated via the site's search box queries?
For example, if I search for an 'x' item in a site's search box and if the site displays a list of results based on the query, would that page be crawled? I am asking this question because this would be a URL that is non existent on the site and hence am confused as to whether Google bots would be able to find it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0