Wrong page ranked in Google, specific example

[georgexx]

Hi All,

I've searched for previous questions and many talk about the same problem but do not post an actual example. I am also thinking to do a blog post and a series of experiments once there is a theory.

My target keyword is "Exhibition Stand Hire" and this is the target page on our site http://goo.gl/qt54lb

Site appears on page 6 of SERPS (google.co.uk), but instead of this page a homepage is listed.

But if I'm searching for the term using quotes, ie "Exhibition Stand Hire" the right page appears on page 4 of the SERPs.

Our home page only uses the keyword in the body text, while target page is very optimised. Could it be over-optimised? I've tried mixing up words in the title tag to not offer an exact match, also i've varied the anchor text of all incoming links but that didn't fix the problem. (Hence why at the moment they all use different terms to point to this page) None of this helped alter what page is chosen to appear.

Is it simply the matter of page not being strong enough compared to other less relevant pages on the site? How come many other sites rank better with much less effort? (i'm using OSE to determine competition)

Thank you.

[georgexx]

Thanks for your answer Jane. The competition is a mix of some sites being very small and more targeted then us, and some less strong domains doing better. I guess this highlights the importance of not having too many narrow pages which end up being weak.

Before the homepage started to rank, there was another wrong page ranking in a similar way until i removed the wording from it also, in the effort to make the correct page show, but looks like google just goes up to the next strong candidate.

[JaneCopland]

Hi George,

My first thought would be that the internal page doesn't have enough authority - from what I can see from OSE, it has no links from third party sources, only internal links: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.exhibithire.co.uk%2Fexhibition-services%2Fexhibition-stand-hire%2F&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=&target=page&group=1

This isn't to say that some sites rank internal pages that have no third party inbound links, but they're generally very strong domains to begin with, e.g. a site like Debenhams having an internal page about (say) pink swimsuits ranking for [pink swimsuits]. I made this example up, checked, and indeed Debenhams does rank for that query, and the page has no inbound third party links. But it's on debenhams.com, and that's the "trick".

What does your competition look like? The domain itself only has a 29/100 domain authority, which can be fine in an uncrowded market but might not be enough for internal links to extent much authority to the desired page. Your home page is also pretty darn relevant to the original query: the site itself is about exhibition hiring, and you mention "stand" once on the home page where that text does not link elsewhere. I would say that the combination of the home page being very relevant for the query and the internal page not having high enough authority are causing this to happen.