What to do if the wrong page is ranking?
-
What to do if the wrong page of your website is ranking and you cannot 301 it?
Apparently an outsourced company the previous manager hired build anchor text links to the homepage, when those links should have been pointing to a deeper page.
As a result, the hompage is now ranking for that term. But I think we can convert a lot more of the visitors if the deeper page is there instead. Obviously, I can't 301 the homepage.
What would you do?
-
Rand also has some advice in his post about this at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions
-
Though it is not guaranteed that the correct page will start to rank but I think following changes might work. Add a link to the respective page you want to rank from the Home page of the site with the desired Anchor Text. Note that this link should not be in the footer but at a prominent position on the Home so it transfers most relevance as per Search Engines.
Try to get some natural links for the respective page without worrying about the anchor text. Make sure that the page you are trying to rank has optimized titles and other page elements with respect to keyword.
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
-
Canonical - unexpected page ranking
We are getting good ranking for an unexpected page, rathewr than the one we were trying to get ranking for. Should we put a canonical on the 'unexpected page' to the page we would like to receive the ranking for - or do we risk losing the ranking? Any suggestions welcomed. Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Substance-create0 -
What are best page titles for sub-domain pages?
Hi Moz communtity, Let's say a website has multiple sub-domains with hundreds and thousands of pages. Generally we will be mentioning "primary keyword & "brand name" on every page of website. Can we do same on all pages of sub-domains to increase the authority of website for this primary keyword in Google? Or it gonna end up as negative impact if Google consider as duplicate content being mentioned same keyword and brand name on every page even on website and all pages of sub domains? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
PDF ranking higher than HTML pages, solution?
Hello Moz community I know this question has been asked before but it seems there is no real answer other than putting a summary of the PDF on the HTML page. My problem is other websites are using my PDFs, I have some PDFs with very high authority links and I would like to either pass the link juice on to my product/category page or do rel=canonical somehow. I'm using bigcommerce as my platform. My website is cwwltd.com. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Neverstop1231 -
Can someone help me understand why this page is ranking so well?
Hi everyone, EDIT: I'm going to link to the actual page, please remove if there are any issues with confidentiality. Here is the page: https://www.legalzoom.com/knowledge/llc/topic/advantages-and-disadvantages-overview It's ranking #2 on Google for "LLC" This page is a couple months old and is substantially heavy in content, but not much more so than all the dozens of other pages online that are competing with it. This is a highly competitive industry and this particular domain is an extremely huge player in this industry. This new page is suddenly ranking #2 for an extremely competitive head term, arguably the most important/high volume keyword being targeted by the entire site. The page is outranking the home page, as well as the service page that exactly targets the query - the one that you would think would be the ranking page for this head term. However, this new page is somewhat of a spin-off with some additional related content about the subject, some videos, resources, a lot of internal links, etc. The first word of the title tag exactly matches the head term. I did observe that almost no other pages on the site have the exact keyword as the first word of the title tag, but that couldn't be sufficient to bring it up so high in the ranks, could it? Another bizarre thing that is happening is that Google is ignoring the Title Tag in the actual HTML (which is a specific question that is accurate to the content on the page), and re-assigning a title tag that basically looks like this: "Head Term | Brand." Why would it do this on this page? Doesn't it usually prefer more descriptive title tags? There are no external links coming up on Moz or Majestic pointing to this page. It has just a couple social shares. It's not being linked to from the home page or top nav bar on the main site. Can anyone explain how this particular page would outrank the main service page targeting this keyword, as well as other highly authoritative, older pages online targeting the same keyword? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC1 -
On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile
We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Big discrepancies between pages in Google's index and pages in sitemap
Hi, I'm noticing a huge difference in the number of pages in Googles index (using 'site:' search) versus the number of pages indexed by Google in Webmaster tools. (ie 20,600 in 'site:' search vs 5,100 submitted via the dynamic sitemap.) Anyone know possible causes for this and how i can fix? It's an ecommerce site but i can't see any issues with duplicate content - they employ a very good canonical tag strategy. Could it be that Google has decided to ignore the canonical tag? Any help appreciated, Karen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?
If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage? Nothing? Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
Bing and Yahoo Ranks work, google ranks not happening
Bing and Yahoo Ranks work, google ranks not happening please help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Djdealeyo0