Google is indexing wrong page for search terms not on that page
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I’m having a problem … the wrong page is indexing with Google, for search phrases “not on that page”.
Explained … On a website I developed, I have four products. For example sake, we’ll say these four products are:
- Sneakers (search phrase: sneakers)
- Boots (search phrase: boots)
- Sandals (search phrase: sandals)
- High heels (search phrase: high heels)
Error:
What is going “wrong” is … When the search phrase “high heels” is indexed by Google, my “Sneakers” page is being indexed instead (and ranking very well, like #2). The page that SHOULD be indexing, is the “High heels” page (not the sneakers page – this is the wrong search phrase, and it’s not even on that product page – not in URL, not in H1 tags, not in title, not in page text – nowhere, except for in the top navigation link).
Clue #1 … this same error is ALSO happening for my other search phrases, in exactly the same manner. i.e. … the search phrase “sandals” is ALSO resulting in my “Sneakers” page being indexed, by Google.
Clue #2 … this error is NOT happening with Bing (the proper pages are correctly indexing with the proper search phrases, in Bing).
Note 1: MOZ has given all my product pages an “A” ranking, for optimization.
Note 2: This is a WordPress website.
Note 3: I had recently migrated (3 months ago) most of this new website’s page content (but not the “Sneakers” page – this page is new) from an old, existing website (not mine), which had been indexing OK for these search phrases.
Note 4: 301 redirects were used, for all of the OLD website pages, to the new website.
I have tried everything I can think of to fix this, over a period of more than 30 days. Nothing has worked. I think the “clues” (it indexes properly in Bing) are useful, but I need help.
Thoughts?
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The OP would like to keep the URLs and queries in confidence, but here is what I found upon investigation for those that might have the same issue in the future:
The main issue looks to be a recent URL change from [second most linked to URL on the domain] to the URL in question. There is a 301 redirect in place (as you mentioned), and the new URL is indexed, but it might be some time before it takes the place of the old URL. For the time being, Google for some reason thinks the other URL is the most relevant page, which is odd as there are more topical pages on the site, but I'm not a robot.
Good thing is that I feel a change coming. If you do a site: search for your domain with "term in question", Google is seeing the right URL as the most relevant page after the homepage. The homepage being first makes sense since it has the term on the page and it's the strongest page on your site.
A few things you might try in the mean time:
- Resumbit a sitemap of your old URLs that have 301 redirects.
- Resubmit a sitemap of the new URLs
- Get the three external links to the old page URL mentioned above changed to the new URL (three external links according to Moz Open Site Explorer)
- Your title tag and H1s are a little overstuffed with keywords right now. Try to dial that back a little and you only should have 1 H1 that is visible on the page. The H1 should be what people see as the title on the page right now rather than hidden in an extra header and in the body copy.
Try those items and give it a little more time.
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Interesting. Can we have the domain, page URLs and phrases?
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Have a read through the latest Whiteboard Friday from Rand - you might pick up some good pointers from that
https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday
-Andy
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Also, just to be double sure that another instance of 'sneakers' is not showing up, try checking Google's text version of the cached page:
Search cache:www.website.com/HighPeelsPage, then look at the text version and verify that Google is not seeing sneakers anywhere other than the one nav instance. Once you have eliminated that possibility you can focus on others.Caro
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Hi Michael,
Perhaps the internal link structure might be the cause of this.
If you have most of your pages linking (for instance with the menu in the sidebar) to the Sneakers-page. Google might think that page is the most important.
Also: new pages take a bit longer to start to rank well in the index. So it might be just a case of a matter of time before the new page starts to rank as you had intended.
Hope this helps?
Bas
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