Destination URL in SERPs keeps changing and I can't work out why.. Help.
-
I am befuddled as to why our destination URL in SERPs keeps changing
oak furniture was nicely returning
http://www.thefurnituremarket.co.uk/oakfurniture.asp
then I changed something yesterday I did 2 things.
-
published a link to that on facebook as part of a competition.
-
redirected dynamic pages to the static URL for oak furniture..
Now for oak furniture the SERPs in GG UK is returning our home page as the most relevant landing page..
Any Idea why?
I'm leaning to an onpage issue than posting on FB..
Thoughts?
-
-
I'm at the same point with an ecommerce. I targeted a select amount of keywords too hard at the start. Now I'm looking at the past years ecommerce conversion keywords and fine tuning all my product pages to better rank them.
-
I originally turned them into image links because we were getting reports of link canibalisation and whilst our new static link pages bedded in and started building their own link profiles I felt it best to put a stop to this.
In other words I still wanted to the homepage to rank whilst the sub pages authority increased. I think we are at a point now where we flip back to text links.
-
You can also redo your navigation menus in text/css styles as well.
-
Agreed. It's even the very first keyword phrase:
<title>Oak Furniture | French Furniture | Mirrored Furniture | Coffee Tabletitle>
-
our oakfurniture.asp page is around 6 months old now and has been indexing for "oak furniture " for the last 3...
now
we only have a fraction of the oak furniture content on our home page. thats on our oak furniture.asp page.
We did have a dynamic catergory page that I did a 301 yesterday to point the static page with the theory it would bolster its internal linking profile.
also I did this because I dont think our CMS cat page was very visually appealing and there was way too much content below the fold.
we do suffer a lot with pagination due to the dynamic URLs we have with this CMS.. on the whole the onpage improvements I have implemented has lead to pleasing amounts of pages being indexed.So I figure google can work around our onpage limitations thanks to webmaster tools etc and index our content.
Our on page is far from perfect though. I have been link building towards a number of inner pages and this page in particular being our flag ship.
I havent done anything silly with it as far am I am aware I just do link building as and when I have time.
Does this clarify anything?
-
and take "oak furniture" out of your homepage heading and meta description
-
You have changed something and now google is responding - they often test different landing pages. I find this a lot with newly launched sites, Google will run through a number of possible landing pages for queries over a few weeks before it settles on one
To get it to pick the one you want:
- Work hard to build links to the page you want, internal and external
- Try eliminate duplicate content - not exact duplicate content, but content that talks about the same thing - I mostly do 1 keyword for 1 page and make sure that no other page cannibalizes its keyword
- build out your oak furniture page - make it substantially more about oak furniture than any other page on your site
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
-
Looks like keyword stuffing, but it isn't
(There was a similar older question on the forum, but it wasn't really answered so please forgive me if this looks like a repeated question) Looks like keyword stuffing, but it isn't We have a massive web store with 80k "commodity products" (and this amount will only increase) which aren't sold the same way normal products are sold (i.e. by brand and model). Commodity products are sold by specification, therefore their product names are actually descriptions of the product. In our case, industrial fasteners (nuts, bolts, washers, screws, etc) sold in bulk. If you click on the link below, you will see that our catalog involves a tremendous amount of repetition, where the products all appear the same, but are varying by dimensions and/or package quantities. The solutions the web store software offers to solve this problem cause issues for us (i.e. displaying the dimensions and quantities ONLY under a common header) but more importantly, we are concerned that search engines are seeing this as keyword stuffing and penalizing the pages. http://www.aspenfasteners.com/Step-Bolts-Inch-Standard-s/407.htm If we can't change the presentation of the page, should we be concerned and if so, how do we let a search engine know that the repetition is legitimate?
Technical SEO | | AspenFasteners0 -
Help!!! Website won't index after taking it over from another IT Company
Hi, A while back we took over a website that was built in Wordpress. We rebuilt it on another platform and switched the servers over whilst retaining the same domain.I had access to the old GA Account however so did the old IT company. Therefore I created a new GA account and used that in the new website pages.Recently we found the website had been blacklisted (previous to us taking it over) and now after being crawled a lot, only 2 pages have been indexed (over a 2month period).We have submitted a request for revision (to relist the website) buthave had no movement.**Just wondering if having a old, active account that was still linked to their old website would affect our Google listing?****Will dropping the old GA Tracking code/script into the site and deleting the new account enable Google to index?**Also, there is ample content, metadata and descriptions on the site.I welcome any help on this please!
Technical SEO | | nimblerdigital0 -
When do you use 'Fetch as a Google'' on Google Webmaster?
Hi, I was wondering when and how often do you use 'Fetch as a Google'' on Google Webmaster and do you submit individual pages or main URL only? I've googled it but i got confused more. I appreciate if you could help. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Rubix1 -
Removing a lot of content & changing url structure.
I recently moved an existing ecommerce site, which I recently purchased, from Volusion to Shopify. The new site has a completely different link structure. The old site also had about 120 products which are not even close to being up to par with the products I now have on the site. So I had to remove all of those pages too. I was just wondering which measures I need to take to deal with this? I created a really nice 404 page. I also 301 redirected the pages which still exist. But I was wondering if there is anything else I should do? Should I request a removal of all the old pages, which no longer exist? Should I do something else I'm not thinking about? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. jim
Technical SEO | | PedroAndJobu0 -
I know I'm missing pages with my page level 301 re-directs. What can I do?
I am implementing page level re-directs for a large site but I know that I will inevitably miss some pages. Is there an additional safety net root level re-direct that I can use to catch these pages and send them to the homepage?
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
Google is keeping very old title tags in the SERPs for my site. How can I fix this?
Hi Around 6 months ago a site I work with changed its brand. One company became two. Despite changing the title when a new site went live around 6 months ago Google still picks up the old title for certain search results relevant to the old title. When a search result is relevant to the new title it shows that. It's very frustrating as we are trying to re-brand and do not want the old brand name showing for some very important search results. Thanks in advance for your help Paul
Technical SEO | | pauldoffman0 -
Ignore url parameters without the 'parameter=' ?
We are working on an ecommerce site that sorts out the products by color and size but doesn't use the sortby= but uses sortby/. Can we tell Google to ignore the sortby/ parameter in Webmaster Tools even though it is not followed by an = sign? For example: www.mysite.com/shirts/tshirts/shopby/size-m www.mysite.com/shirts/tshirts/shopby/color-black Can we tell WMT to ignore the 'shopby/' parameter so that only the tshirts page will be indexed? Or does the shopby have to be set up as 'shopby=' ? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0 -
Duplicate content and URL's
Hi Guys, Hope you are all well. Just a quick question which you will find nice and easy 🙂 I am just about to work through duplicate content pages and URL changes. Firstly, With the duplicate content issue i am finding the seo friendly URL i would normally direct to in some cases has less links, authority and root domain to it than some of the unseo friendly URL's. will this harm me if i still 301 redirect them to the seo friendly URL. Also, With the url changed it is going to be a huge job to change all the url so they are friendly and the CMS system is poor. Is there a better way of doing this? It has been suggested that we create a new webpage with a friendly URL and redirect all the pages to that. Will this lose all the weight as it will be a brand new page? Thank you for your help guys your legends!! Cheers Wayne
Technical SEO | | wazza19850