My homepage no longer ranks for a keyword, instead a page from the blog now appears in the results
-
Hello,
Our site used to rank for a specific keyword - "eco products", with a link going to the homepage. However, in the last few weeks, we've noticed that the home page no longer ranks for this keyword, and instead the second result on the page is a link to a catagory page on our blog.
I'd be very grateful if anyone had any information about why this might have happened, and what possible steps I could take to remedy the situation.
Many thanks,
Sophy
-
Ha, no worries buddy. Great minds and all that.
-
Sorry Marcus, We must have been typing at the same time.
-
Hi Sophy, It's actually in line with what Marcus was saying. Your two pages are competing with each other. If you look at the Title Tag for the home page, there is nothing that says "eco products." But if you look at your category page, you'll see not only does the Title Tag say "Eco Products," but it's also in the URL. So you'll have to make a decision as to whether or not you'll want Eco Products to have it's own page or to have it show up on the home page. If you want it to show on the home page, you'll want that in the Title Tag, and you will need to rename that category page as well as renaming the Title Tag.
-
Hey Sophie
In this instance, I am guessing you don't want to lose that page from ranking but the page itself is called 'eco-products' and the term you are targeting on the homepage is eco-products so you seem to have a conflict of interest between those two pages.
Lets look at the homepage:
**Title: **Nigel's Eco Store - Environmentally friendly products and eco friendly gifts for sustainable living
Keyword Usage: 2 - once in a page title, once in an image title (0 times on the page itself)Lets look at the /eco-products/ page
Title: Eco Products
Keyword Usage: 13 times on page & 27 times in total taking all HTML elements into accountAnchor Text
Additionally, lets look at the anchor text to the pages. The homepage has the standard logo and image links from the main nav but the eco-products page has tons of links with the term 'eco products' from the 'posted in tags'.
Summary
In brief, without looking at the external issues, the ranking is kind of right. Everything on your blog page is saying hey, I am about eco products but your homepage hardly uses this term at all.
Your homepage ranks first (uk at least) for a bunch of other terms:
environmentally friendly products store
eco storeSo, is this such a bad thing? I imagine, if you really want to rank the homepage for this term you could rename that page / tag to something else and work that phrase into the homepage a little more. You seem so strong for eco + x that it would likely be doable (and you have the historical ranking for the term).
Maybe it may be a good chance to look at your landing pages and add a new page to catch this traffic?
There are plenty of options but the approach depends on what you are looking for here but there is certainly no mystery why that page ranks for that term over your homepage. I think the simplest solution is just a case of changing the name of that page/tag to something more suitable and building some relevance for eco products on the homepage OR looking at a new optimised landing page for that term.
Hope it helps!
Marcus -
Hi,
Well, it's good to hear I'm not alone! The link to the homepage which used to appear for this term is http://www.nigelsecostore.com/, and the link to the page which now appears in second place for this term is http://www.nigelsecostore.com/blog/category/eco-products/
Thank you for your suggestions,
Sophy
-
Hi Marcus,
Thanks for getting back to me so promptly, and thanks for the suggestions - very useful.
Here is a link to the page that comes up for this keyword - http://www.nigelsecostore.com/blog/category/eco-products/
Looking in Google Webmaster Tools, I can't see a single link to this page.
Our homepage http://www.nigelsecostore.com/ always used to rank for this term "eco products", and I can understand that its normal for your ranking to go up and down over time for a term, but for the homepage to completely disappear from the search results for this term, and to be replaced by this category page on our blog seems very weird!
Thanks,
Sophy
-
Hi Sophy, I had a similar problem. I combated this by adding url conical. I also removed most of the backlinks to that particular category and redirected it to my index page. It took a couple of weeks to get back to how it was. It will be hard to find out the reason without posting a link though! Thanks
-
Hey Sophy
Could be a lot of things, could you supply a link?
- maybe the blog page is more relevant for that term or you have two competing pages
- maybe the blog page picked up some external links with that anchor so became more relevant than the homepage
- maybe the sites structure or linking gives more relevance to that page for that term
The solutions are kind of similar to the suggestions above
- make sure the homepage is more relevant for that term
- make sure the two pages are not competing for that term
- do some link building for that term to the homepage
- ensure the internal linking and anchors are not promoting that page for that term
Hard to go further than these general hints without a URL but happy to take a look if you want to post a link.
Hope it helps!
Marcus
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
-
Understanding why our new page doesn't rank. Internal link structure to blame? + understand canonical pages more.
Hi guys. Sorry it's an essay...BUT, i think a lot of you will find this an interesting question. This question is in 2 (related) parts, and I imagine it would be an 'advanced' SEO question. Hoping you guys can help bring some real insight 🙂 Always amazed at the quality for this forum/ community. **Context... ** We had a duplicate content issue caused by this page and it's product permutations, so we placed canonical tags on all the product permutations to solve it. Worked a treat. However, we now have more **product ranges. **We now sell Diaries, Notebooks & Music books, which are clearly different from one another. So...we've placed canonical tags on all the product permutations leading back to the 'parent' theme. In other words, all the diary permutations 'lead back' to the diary page. All the notebooks permutations 'lead back' to the main notebook page. So on and so forth. Make sense so far? Context end..... Issue. Amazingly our Diary page outranks our notebook pagefor the search term 'Design your own Notebook'. The notebook page is well optimised for this search term, and the diary page avoids the word 'notebook' altogether (so no keyword cannibalisation going on). Possible reason? Our Diary page has a vast amount of internal links to it throughout our site. The notebook page has only a few. Could this be the issue? If so, what reading/ blogs/ content/ tools would you recommend to help understand and solve this problem? i.e) Better understanding internal link structure for SEO. 2nd part of the question (in the context of internal linking for SEO). When there are internal links to a page with a conical tag does that 'count' towards the 'parent page', or simply towards that specific page? I really hope that makes sense. If it's clear as mud just shout. Isaac. EDIT: All pages in question have been indexed since we added these changes to the site.
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
2000 Active pages 404 on LIVE Ecommerce site - what will google do now?
Hi All, One of my ecommerce site having more than 20,000 pages from that one of the categories having 2000 pages showing 404 and still taking time for developer to fix this issue and may be they will be able to fix after 2-3 days so is this okay with google or google will take any action during this period? Thanks! Dev
On-Page Optimization | | devdan0 -
Worth redirecting old blog posts into pages?
I'm working on a site that has some blog posts from 2011 - 2013 ranking on the first page for relevant terms. I'm going through and updating some of the content, internal links, etc., and wanted to know if it's worth redirecting some of these blog posts into new pages (in WordPress). Right now, the blog post URLs are long - exampleURL.com/2011/3/9/blog-post-title/ and the dates show up in the SERPs. I'd like to have the date removed so that the content doesn't look outdated, and I'd also like to have cleaner URLs. In your opinion, is it worth creating new pages and redirecting the old blog posts, or is the benefit of doing this not worth the effort? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | dchristensen30 -
Title tag of product page including category keyword?
I'm doing some work on a site that essentially is about giving and getting reviews. It's heirarchy has categories and products within those categories. For the title tag of the product pages, they currently have "Best {Category} | {Product} Reviews" I've advised them that they should remove the "Best {Category}" part because a) they're already targeting the category pages themselves and b) from a user perspective, the product page should just have a title tag that makes sense for that particular page (the page is not necessarily the "best" and certainly is not a series of products within that category). I wanted to post here to confirm that my advice is sound. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | jim_shook0 -
Deleted pages still registering as 404 pages.
I have a an all html site that I can only work on through the ftp. The previous marketing company ran a script that built thousands of location landing pages, but all they did was change the tags and headers and the keywords in the pages, other than that they are all duplicate pages. I removed them, but Google is reading them as 404 pages. How do I tell Google those pages don't exist? or do I just need to let the bots crawl it a few times and it will see that eventually?
On-Page Optimization | | SwanJob0 -
Two keywords in one page
Hi guys, I have a question...is it possible to posicionate two keywords in one only page? If yes, how would it be the process so that Google take note of that action/s. How many criteria/keywords are recommended to positionate in one site? Thanks all
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Keyword Cannibalization/stuffing on an ecommerce category page
Hi, Whats the best way to tackle e-commerce category pages? If you have, say, a category showing 30 pairs of socks, and each of the sock products in the lists has a 'view more' link, a link from the product name and a link from the thumbnail. Naturally each of those links should be the product name - sprinkled with a slight variation, a preceding 'View more on [product name]' or superseded with the shop name, so you dont end up with complete duplicate link titles, you get the idea. But you suddenly end up with 90 instances of links with title tags containing 'socks', which ultimately lead to keyword stuffing/cannibalization - especially as you then move to another category with, say, sports socks showing 40 products and therefore 120 link titles also with the word 'socks' Thought on a postcard please? Thanks Tom
On-Page Optimization | | pretige120 -
Rankings
The rankings have been in a pending status for several day. Is there a problem with the software? We are in the middle of our test month and need to be able to evaluate the software to decide if we will continue. Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | Barb1230