Keywords Directing Traffic To Incorrect Pages

[ShawnHerrick]

We're experiencing an issue where we have keywords directing traffic to incorrect child landing pages. For a generic example using fake product types, a keyword search for XL Widgets might send traffic to a child landing page for Commercial Widgets instead.

In some cases, the keyword phrase might point a page for a child landing page for a completely different type of product (ex: a search for XL Widgets might direct traffic to XL Gadgets instead).

It's tough to figure out exactly why this might be happening, since each page is clearly optimized for its respective keyword phrase (an XL Widgets page, a Commercial Widgets page, an XL Gadgets page, etc), yet one page ends up ranking for another page’s keyword, while the desired page is pushed out of the SERPs.

We're also running into an issue where one keyword phrase is pointing traffic to three different child landing pages where none of the ranking pages are the page we've optimized for that keyword phrase, or the desired page we want to rank appears lower in the SERPs than the other two pages (ex: a search for XL Widgets shows XL Gadgets on the first SERP, Commercial Widgets on the second SERP, and then finally XL Widgets down on the third or fourth SERP).

We suspect this may be happening because we have too many child landing pages that are targeting keyword terms that are too similar, which might be confusing the search engines. Can anyone offer some insight into why this may be happening, and what we could potentially do to help get the right pages ranking how we'd like?

[ShawnHerrick]

Yeah, we had suspected that just having too many keywords that are too similar could be causing confusion for search engines, but it's good to have a third party affirmation to support that assessment. We do intend to rework and "un" optimize some of our pages that are competing with one another and see what happens. Thanks for the assistance and for sharing that blog article too.

[ShawnHerrick]

Thanks for the response and linking to that article, some helpful tips there.

[josh-riley]

I think you answered your own question - there's confusion for the search engine. Similar keywords can do that- even though you say it's clear to you what page is optimized there's some data to prove that the search engines aren't in agreement. (I have a lot of pages and run into the same issue.)

Have you run the competing pages through the Moz optimization tool to see what feedback it gives you? If you see each page is an "A" for the same term, there's some information you can work with to start reworking your content to "un" optimize the pages you don't want to rank.

I like this article Rand wrote that addresses how to correct this issue: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Check out this post on the subject

Make sure your internal links to the landing pages have the correct, distinct anchors.