Getting Google to provide a different URL in SERP
-
For one of my client’s sites, I have several keywords that are ranking in the top 5 positions. However, they have a high bounce rate. I believe this is because Google is delivering a different URL than the page we have optimized for the keyword.
Any suggestions on ways I can get Google to present our preferred page?
-
Rand wrote about this as well at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions.
-
I hadn't gotten that far in my analysis, so that is helpful advice. Thanks.
-
Good idea! Thanks
-
You may also want to consider the effects of inbound links to the less optimal page that is ranking and consider updating that URL to have a better landing page experience.
-
If G thinks 'wrong' page is best fit to query, i'd check your on-page optimisation for 'bad' and 'good' pages via Moz Research Tools then if 'wrong' page does come out best tweak it to reduce bounce.
(hope i've read this correctly)
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
-
Google Displaying Same Meta description for all pages?
Hi all, I am wondering if you can help – I have a client using Yoast for their Meta descriptions and each is filled in and unique, but when searching ‘ski magic’ on Google, the page with linked pages under all but one show the same meta description? I am hoping you can see the issue in the image below 6f1458e2-9507-490d-bece-b14978d3f95f-image.png
On-Page Optimization | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Url too long
Hi we have a wordpress website for Office Furniture Our domain name does not have office furniture in it. So we went from having domain.com/shop/category/second-sub-cat to domain.com/office-furniture/category/second-category However we now have 509 products flagged with too long urls I am wondering whether we should change back : For example domain.com/office-furniture/office-corner-desks/beech-corner-desks Should I go back to domain.com/shop/office-corner-desks/beech-corner-desks Or am I going to confuse matters even more? I should say this only affects categories as the products themselves are /shop/product I am just concerned that changing the re-direct in place originally will just make matters worse and confuse things - would I get more value changing back? Or should I stick with it and just try to shorten urls individually by product titles etc
On-Page Optimization | | KellyDSD860 -
HTTPS, free certificates and Google seo
As we all know, Google decided to give some weight in rankings to encrypted sites. SSL certificate providers are quite a lot out there, but there is also a free alternative (Let’s Encrypt). I've been going over some of these services and compared Godaddy's and the above certificates, and there isn't much of a difference. The question is: using a free certificate would have the same effect as a paid one? I would rather pay for one than be punished for using a free one, but free would be good too.
On-Page Optimization | | anitawapa
What's your take on this? Thank you0 -
Does the content in Joomla modules get indexed
Hello Moz, we are using Joomla to build websites. In Joomla you can put content in modules. What we would like to know if would search engines index content in modules, as it does with content attached to menu links? Thanks Ian
On-Page Optimization | | Substance-create0 -
Content with changing URL and duplicate content
Hi everyone, I have a question regarding content (user reviews), that are changing URL all the time. We get a lot of reviews from users that have been dining at our partner restaurants, which get posted on our site under (new) “reviews”. My worry however is that the URL for these reviews is changing all the time. The reason for this is that they start on page 1, and then get pushed down to page 2, and so on when new reviews come in. http://www.r2n.dk/restaurant-anmeldelser I’m guessing that this could cause for serious indexing problems? I can see in google that some reviews are indexed multiple times with different URLs, and some are not indexed at all. We further more have the specific reviews under each restaurant profile. I’m not sure if this could be considered duplicate content? Maybe we should tell google not to index the “new reviews section” by using robots.txt. We don’t get much traffic on these URLs anyways, and all reviews are still under each restaurant-profile. Or maybe the canonical tag can be used? I look forward to your input. Cheers, Christian
On-Page Optimization | | Christian_T2 -
Google Crawl Errors from vbseo change
We have vbseo setup on our site and for some reason a setting was changed unexpectedly and was un-noticed where it changed the URL of all the pages and so none of our pages were getting indexed by google any longer due to 401 errors. Most of our SE traffic fell off. We discovered the issue a couple weeks ago and we changed the setting back so that the URLs are the same as they were originally before but in Google webmasters it's still showing crawl errors and our search engine traffic hasn't recovered at all. We have sitemaps being sent daily.
On-Page Optimization | | RudySF0 -
Directory site with an URL structure dilemma
Hello, We run a site, which lists local businesses and tag them by their nature of business (similar to Yelp). Our problem is, that our category and sub-category(i.e.: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant or www.example.com/budapest/cars/spare-parts) pages are extremely weak, and get almost no traffic, but most of the traffic (95+ percent) goes for the actual business pages. While this might be a completely normal thing, I still would like to strengthen our category (listing) pages as well, as these should be the ones targeted by some of general keywords, like ‘restaurant’ or ‘restaurant+budapest’. One of the issues I have identified as a possible problem, that we do not have a clear hierarchy within the site, so while the main category pages are linked from the homepage (and the sub-categories from here), there is no bottom-up linking from the business pages back to the category pages, as the business page URLs look like this: www.example.com/business/onyx-restaurant-budapest. I think, that the good site- and url structure for the above would be like this: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant/hungarian/onyx-restaurant. My only issue is, perhaps not with the restaurants but with others, that some of the businesses have multiple tags, so they can be tagged i.e. as car saloon, auto repair and spare parts at the same time. Sometimes, they even have 5+ tags on them. My idea is, that I will try to identify a primary tag for all the businesses (we maintain 99 percent of them right now), and the rest of their tags would be secondary ones. I would then use canonicalization and mark the page with the primary tag in the url as the preferred one for that specific content. With this scenario, I might have several URLs with the same content (complete duplicates), but they would point to one page only as the preferred one, while our visitors could still reach the businesses in any preferred ways, so either by looking for car saloons, auto-repair or spare parts. This way, we could also have breadcrumbs on all the pages, which now we miss completely. Can this be a feasible scenario? Might it have a side-effect? Any hints on how to do it a better way? Many thanks, Andras
On-Page Optimization | | Dilbak0 -
Title not showing in Serps
Sorry if I've posted in the wrong section; in a nutshell my page title for 2x key terms (that I've noticed) is not showing in the Serps for my listing. Instead, the keyphrase I'm searching for shows up, and in one case my site name is appended. Can anyone tell me why this is? If I take a stab in the dark, i'd plum for Gg not thinking my page title is up to scratch for the particular search term.... but that's just a punt. Any help, greatly appreciated. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | newstd1000