Ranked page is not desired page
-
I have a question on a problem I am currently faced with. There is a certain keyword that my employer wants to rank for. The good news is that sometimes it does rank in the top 5 pages of Google. (It drops in and out) The bad news is that it is going to a page that we need to keep, but not the ideal place we want people who are looking for that keyword to go to.
I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with this type of situation and what tactic they used to get people to the better page.
-
See my frustration!?
Yes. I see it. I see some of this in my own SERPs.
In my SERPs that target items that are heavily purchased at Christmas the spammers buy a big load of links in the fall, get the rankings just before Christmas, then cut the links. Pisses me off every year.
-
And people keep saying "just give it time and they will be penalized," but it's been this way for 9 months now.
How many algo updates/refreshes have happened in these 9 months? When's it gonna take?
See my frustration!?
-
Well for me the preferred page is not ranking as I have recently changed the URL. At least that's my assumption even though it ranked high for a couple days.
The sites that are beating it have link profiles containing completely irrelevant links from random forums, fake poorly written blog article submissions, and disgusting poison directories. The entire first page of results for this keyword is filled by black-hat SEO tactics.
The page outranking my main page isn't ranking that high either. It's just ranking above the desired. Again I feel that the issue here is that the URL is new and that time and a little proper link-building will fix it, but I can't tell you how frustrating it is that the market I'm competing for is winning with black hat tactics and poorly constructed websites.
-
First, give thanks if you have a page ranking well for a valuable keyword. This really isn't a problem - you have an opportunity.
If your preferred page is not ranking highest for this keyword then get to work improving it. The page that is beating it must be a really good page or, you have bad optimization, poison links, low visitor engagement or some other problem with your preferred page.
If the undesired page is extremely powerful and you can't move your preferred page above it, figure out how to move the traffic to the page that you want them to see. We use "house ads" and very obvious links to what we want the visitor to see. If visitor really wants to see your preferred page and you have a big, contrasting, inviting ad to tell them what you got above the fold and really obvious then he is going to click it. If he doesn't click it then he doesn't give a damn about your preferred page or you suck at making ads.
-
I'm going to attempt to "bump" this thread as I'm very disappointed that it hasn't gained any responses..
If anybody has any input we'd love to hear it!
-
This is incredibly interesting because I wanted to come here this morning and talk about pretty much this exact topic. So I'm going to try and piggyback on your thread so as not to have 2 separate threads about the same thing but please tell me to leave if it seems more like a hijack.
As I said I am facing the exact same situation. A bit more detail:
We have a primary targeted keyword, let's call it "main keyword" that is a service. This particular page had a ton of black hat work done for it in the past. So there were thousands of poison links pointing to the page "main-keyword.html" and what I did was after spending as much time as I could manually removing links, I finally gave up and changed the URL so that these links would 404. So now the page's URL is "main-keyword-services.html"
This seemed to work great at first. We hit page 2 of the SERPs about 10 days later and all of those poison links were no longer listed in GWT. That felt really good. But then the carousel kept a-swingin' and the main-keyword-services.html page dropped way out of the SERPs.
Now this is where it gets interesting: We also have a page on our blog featuring an infographic dedicated to these services. That URL is "main-keyword-infographic.html"
This page is ranking on page 2 of the SERPs and that's with very little link-building efforts. Of course these two pages are connected internally, so it'd be nice if both would rank. (I built this through EGOL's advice way back of trying to get multiple pages to rank for one keyword as my competitors were doing.) But right now I really don't want the infographic page to beat out the main services page.
All I can think to do is continue my link building efforts, and that's what I would have come here to tell you mr. bigbadwolf. However I feel like there's something I'm missing.
So I'm dying to see any input from the rest of the community. Sorry my post wasn't very helpful to you, TC, but perhaps together we will find what we're looking for. Unfortunately (or heck, maybe fortunately) I'm pretty sure all it means is we need to kick-up our SEM efforts.
It's frustrating for me because our competitors are outranking us with nothing but black hat tactics. Links from hip hop forums, fake tumblr and weebly accounts and stupid hair-removal blogs. It's a link service they are purchasing and they have been for some time, and it works for all of them. I refuse to stoop to that level but I can feel my boss getting close to saying "no, it works for them we're going back to buying links." I mean they've been ranking for like 8 months with these tactics. WTH!?
Okay thanks all
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
-
How would you push up a page that is already ranking in the top 20?
One of our pages is currently ranking around the 11th position in Google. According to MOZ page grader its page optimization score is an A. I've manually checked the on page optimization and it's done properly. Our page speed is in the 20s according to google page speed insight tool and when I look at one of our top competitors their scores are in the 60s. So that may be an issue. Our DA is 70 and our top competitor's DA is 85. However we have more backlinks and social shares for our page. So do you think our page speed may be working against us? What else would you check or consider optimizing? I'm just trying to come up with other possible causes that would be working against us. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | eddys_kap1 -
How to improve page authority?
Hello guys, I am in need of some helpful tips to improve my page authority for this site www.servicii-funerare-iuliana.ro . I have page authority 0, and I don't know why... Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | iulianafun0 -
Will Google Custom Search results on my home page kill it's ranking?
This is probably a dumb question, but here goes anyway. 🙂 On a site I have it would be very useful to the reader to offer a search box that uses a Google Custom Search that I have optimized to search websites that are closely on-topic with my site. I know it sounds bad that I would send people to other sites, but just assume that the reasons are valid for this discussion. My question is, if the search results are set to display on the same page (the home page) as the search box, will the links in the search results to external sites just bleed my page rank to death? I assume it would, but thought I'd check just in case I'm missing something. I have to option to place the results on separate page of my site, and noindex it, but it won't be as powerful as it would be on the home page.
On-Page Optimization | | bizzer0 -
What if Paginated Pages all have PageRank?
Paginated Pages, page 2,3,4 etc.... they aren't supposed to have a PageRank, right? If they are only linked to from themselves, only the original page, Page 1, is supposed to be showing PageRank? I'm trying to double check that I am handling this right. I'm not using canonical, or noindex or any of that... just using rel next and prev, which I thought would be fine. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | MadeLoud0 -
I have two pages ranking for the same keyword.
The index page and the targeted landing page for that keyword. They have different content, title, meta but I am competing with myself for the main keyword in the industry. What is the best way to fix this? 301 the keyword page to the index page?
On-Page Optimization | | Aftermath_SEO0 -
Home Page SEO
Hi! We recently re-designed our home page in early March. After Google panda, we re-tweaked it again, before we take it live, we really want to get some expert's opinions. We would be grateful for any comments/suggestions/feedback, particularly in the following area (you will need to click a few times to get the page to real size): is the bottom content ok? please scroll down all the way. 2) We used semantic keywords for 5-6 anchor interlinks to the same page to promote core products from the home page. Is this too much? 80% links on the footer is a repetition of header navigation links, do these footer serve any SEO value or is it over - optimization? Here is the URL: https://www.dropbox.com/gallery/36547134/1/WebDesign?h=109d4a Thanks a lot!
On-Page Optimization | | ypl0 -
Ranking for specific pages
HI, Lets say my website is abc.com and my targeted keyword is abc for index page. Internal pages, like abc.com/apple.htm, abc.com/banana.htm. The targeted keyword for apple.htm is fresh apples, buy apples, and for banana.htm, fresh banana, buy banana. How to define these keywords in the campaign. Please suggest. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | younus0 -
Old pages
I have a site where I have 5,000 new products each year, I never waned to deleted the old pages due to links pointing to them and keywords. But I now have 20,000 plus pages, does having that many pages spread out my link juice or does it effect me in any other ways over having a site with 5,000 pages or should I keep not deleting old pages so I dont loose any links? Along with that I currently do not link to my old pages from my site so Im guessing google does not get to them very often if at all, if you agree to still keep them should I link to them somewhere? Because the products are not that simiiar and they do bring added value I dont think canonical would work here
On-Page Optimization | | Dirty0