Why do in-site search result pages rank better than my product pages?
-
Maybe this is a common SERP for a generic product type but I'm seeing it a lot more often. Here is an example SERP "rolling stools".
The top 4 results are dynamic in-site search pages from Sears, ebay and Amazon (among others). I understand their influence and authority but why would a search return a dynamic in-site SERP instead of a solid product page.
A better question would be - How do I get my in-site SERPs to rank or how do I get my client's page to rise above the #5 spot is currently ranks at?
Thanks
-
Thanks Keri. That gives me some ideas for my next steps. I won't go against Google's guidelines but if I can generate a few pre-generated search pages that would be helpful to my visitors then I may get a win-win.
-
Ben S, Ben W is asking why other sites with search result pages are ranking above his product pages, and how he might get his search result pages (from search within his site) ranking. The noindex and canonicalizing won't help him in that case.
Ben W, I don't have a good answer for you on that. It's frustrating, especially when Google says they don't want to see search results from a site in their search results. I remember removing the noindex from some pre-generated keyword result pages on a non-profit site about three years ago and watching our traffic greatly increase, and wondered why I had followed what Google said for so long before that.
-
Hi Ben,
- Are the pages canonicalized?
- Have you considered no indexing search results?
- Do you have links pointing to search result pages?
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
-
Our Journey back to Good Rankings.
17 year old support site on the topic of hair loss. The home page (and pretty much all internal pages) enjoyed Page 1 Place 1 ranking out of 64 million search results for 12 of those years, for our main search phrase: hair loss. Other internal pages ranked #1 for other search phrases. I believe we were blessed by Google because we did everything the best we could: Genuine, manually constructed, unique, relevant content that was created from the heart. Other generalized health sites linked-to our site for more information on hair loss, and we had a couple thousand back-links that we never had to pay for. For the last 7 years or so, core content and news center went stagnant, but user-driven content (discussion forums) continued chugging along. Very old CMS systems had created duplicate content (print pages, PDF pages, share pages) and the site was not mobile-friendly at all. By the end of 2013, our home page had been bumped to the middle of Page 2 for "hair loss" as Google began pushing us down. Replacing our 700 page site dedicated to the topic of hair loss with random news articles, and dermatology organization sites that had little more than a paragraph of content on the topic. Traffic and income dropped by over 75% with this change, and by 2015 we were looking at a 9 year old site design that wasn't mobile-friendly, and had no updated content outside of the Forums for about as long. Mid 2015 we began a frantic renovation. The store was converted to a mobile-friendly design, tossed into HTTPS, and our developer screwed up, forgetting to put canonicals in place. Soon after, our store rankings dropped to almost zero. By the end of 2015 this was fixed, and we were spending tens of thousands to convert a very large, very old site into WordPress with a responsive, mobile friendly, lightning fast page-load design. We had no Google Analytics data prior to this either. Actions Taken starting Jan 1, 2016 - May 2016: Static Homepage + core content > Now put into WordPress. (80 pages) - proper 301's. News section running a 10 year old "PostNuke" CMS > Now put into WordPress. (300 pages). 301's. Forums running a 5 year old vBulletin > Now put into XenForo. (160,000 pages). 301's. Profiles section running a 10 year old "SocialEngine" CMS > Now put into new SocialEngine. (10,000 pages)* Site moved from HTTP > HTTPS. Proper 301's. Store CMS already finished months prior but sales dropped by 90%. Almost zero. Old forum CMS had created countless duplicate URLs. All of these 410'd. Old forum CMS had 65,000 pointless member profile pages indexed. All 410'd. Old news CMS created 4+ dup pages for every article (print, etc). All 301'd to new Article URL. Our HTACCESS file is thousands of lines long, trying to clean everything up, and redirect everything back to one, accurate, proper URL for each piece of content. It was a lot of work! After 17 years, we obviously had spammy sites linking to us. I quickly deleted content on my site the worst offenders were linking to. Then hired an SEO person to create a disavow audit on the other 20,000 sites liking to us. He settled on around 300 URLs needing disavow, but commented that didn't see any evidence we'd been penalized by Panda. He finished Friday and we will submit disavow Monday. Ran Screaming Frog audit on the site Cleaned up Google Search Console fully Created properties and submitted new sitemaps there. Monitored each property for the last 3 months and addressed 100% of issues raised. Revived Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram Accounts. Began publishing new content in our /news/ section and cross-posting to Social Media. Began improving up our Title Tags in the Forums as they often were pointless: "Hi! Need help!?" **Despite this, nothing has helped. Nothing has budged. Our traffic hasn't moved an inch since January. Sales have dropped 90% and site income has almost dried up. ** I have taken out a $25,000 personal loan just to cover my mortgage and pay my bills while I attempt to identify what's going wrong, and how to fix it. It bought me about 3 months, and that 3 months is almost up. I hired 2 or 3 different SEO experts with varying levels of experience. Due to no Google Analytics data to draw on, none of them could come up with any specific explanations for our drop in ranking over the last 4 years. That's why I took the approach to just "do everything" to fix all problems identified, and then cross my fingers. It hasn't worked. As of today our home page is not even found in google for our main search phrase: hair loss. Its simply not there. At all. And the only thing that is ranking is our forums, ranked at "67", which is horrible. But I don't understand why a site that was doing so well for over a decade has now been completely dropped from Google, without a single notice in Console or otherwise, explaining any problems. I realize this is a massive undertaking, and an equally massive post. But any time you can spend helping me will be forever appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | HLTalk0 -
Ranking Drop After Switching Sites
I have a client who's rankings dropped after switching to out site. We know that rankings can drop a little after switching, but we are concerned that hers are still low. Any suggestions? As far as I can tell, the links to her site remained the same. Thanks Holly
Algorithm Updates | | hwade1 -
Same page but appearing in Google with different titles
I have a page ranking on position 1 for a key phrase. The key phrase is the title of the page as well. I'll use a mock key phrase to aid my question - "Teeth and Gums" So the page is ranking number 1 for "Teeth and Gums" and "Teeth and Gums" is the meta title. However, I went ahead and did a new search adding an additional keyword to the original search. When I did a new search adding an additional keyword to the original search, Google has done something weird.. Let's say the search is "Dentistry - Teeth and Gums", Google has ranked my page again as number 1 but changed the title. The title in the search result is now "Dentistry - Teeth and Gums" How and why? It's kinda like Google PPC's keyword insertion but the title hasn't got anything weird like {KeyWord: Dentistry}. It's just "Teeth and Gums" Has this happened to you guys? Any ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Keyword search results
Is there any tools that provide information on how many results there are for a given keyword? Also, would this be a good way to do research for which keyword I should optimize my page for google SERP, basically to find a less competitive keyword. My thinking was that if the search results were lower it would be easier to rank for that keyword with SEO.
Algorithm Updates | | bilsonx0 -
Problems with Google results
Hi Everybody, I ve been dealing with this issue for a while now. i have a multilingual website: www.vallnord.com When a search for Vallnord in Google it always shows the result in Catalan, but it does not show what I specified in the meta description, it displays what it crawls from the home page. I have 2 problems here: It is not showing my meta description. What can I do? It is not showing the language from which the search was made. Example: if you search from Google.com and your default language is english it should been displayed the result from the english HTML. www.vallnord.com/en but it is not like this. It is always the catalan (default language of the site) the one that is displayed. I have tried several things already: Inserting the Hreflang function Changing the descriptions Resubmitting the sitemap via Google Webmaster I can not figure out what is going on because if you search: "Vallnord Castellano" it will display the spanish URL but still not the proper description. Moreover if you search: "www.vallnord.com/es" on google , it will display the proper URL and description. FYI, I am using 301 redirects for the languages: es.vallnord.com it is the sames as www.vallnord.com/es In addition to this, If using Yahoo search engine there is no problem. it will show the proper language. from yahoo.com the first result is in english and from yahoo.es the first result Spanish. So any idea what would be the problem?And furthermore, any Idea which would be the solution? Thanks in advance, Guido.
Algorithm Updates | | SilbertAd0 -
Do Google donations to Wikimedia show any bias in search results?
Over the weekend we learned Google co-founder Sergey Brin donated $500,000 to Wikimedia, the parent company of Wikipedia.com. Last year I believe Google donated $2 million to Wikimedia. I now ask, is this suspicious in anyway, seeing that Wikipedia ranks so well in Google for so many terms? There are several blog posts about it online here and there throughout the years, but what does everyone think?
Algorithm Updates | | DanDeceuster0 -
Ranking Riddle Who Gets the #1 Spot?
Out of these two competitors, who should receive the #1 spot on Google for Furniture Stores in Delaware and why or why not? [see attached images] fb-url-data.png cohen-url-data.png fb-anchor.png cohen-anchor.png fb-on-page.png cohen-on-page.png
Algorithm Updates | | Getz.pro0