Destination URL in SERPs keeps changing and I can't work out why.. Help.
-
I am befuddled as to why our destination URL in SERPs keeps changing
oak furniture was nicely returning
http://www.thefurnituremarket.co.uk/oakfurniture.asp
then I changed something yesterday I did 2 things.
-
published a link to that on facebook as part of a competition.
-
redirected dynamic pages to the static URL for oak furniture..
Now for oak furniture the SERPs in GG UK is returning our home page as the most relevant landing page..
Any Idea why?
I'm leaning to an onpage issue than posting on FB..
Thoughts?
-
-
I'm at the same point with an ecommerce. I targeted a select amount of keywords too hard at the start. Now I'm looking at the past years ecommerce conversion keywords and fine tuning all my product pages to better rank them.
-
I originally turned them into image links because we were getting reports of link canibalisation and whilst our new static link pages bedded in and started building their own link profiles I felt it best to put a stop to this.
In other words I still wanted to the homepage to rank whilst the sub pages authority increased. I think we are at a point now where we flip back to text links.
-
You can also redo your navigation menus in text/css styles as well.
-
Agreed. It's even the very first keyword phrase:
<title>Oak Furniture | French Furniture | Mirrored Furniture | Coffee Tabletitle>
-
our oakfurniture.asp page is around 6 months old now and has been indexing for "oak furniture " for the last 3...
now
we only have a fraction of the oak furniture content on our home page. thats on our oak furniture.asp page.
We did have a dynamic catergory page that I did a 301 yesterday to point the static page with the theory it would bolster its internal linking profile.
also I did this because I dont think our CMS cat page was very visually appealing and there was way too much content below the fold.
we do suffer a lot with pagination due to the dynamic URLs we have with this CMS.. on the whole the onpage improvements I have implemented has lead to pleasing amounts of pages being indexed.So I figure google can work around our onpage limitations thanks to webmaster tools etc and index our content.
Our on page is far from perfect though. I have been link building towards a number of inner pages and this page in particular being our flag ship.
I havent done anything silly with it as far am I am aware I just do link building as and when I have time.
Does this clarify anything?
-
and take "oak furniture" out of your homepage heading and meta description
-
You have changed something and now google is responding - they often test different landing pages. I find this a lot with newly launched sites, Google will run through a number of possible landing pages for queries over a few weeks before it settles on one
To get it to pick the one you want:
- Work hard to build links to the page you want, internal and external
- Try eliminate duplicate content - not exact duplicate content, but content that talks about the same thing - I mostly do 1 keyword for 1 page and make sure that no other page cannibalizes its keyword
- build out your oak furniture page - make it substantially more about oak furniture than any other page on your site
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
-
No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag
Pages on my site show No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag. However, when I inspect the pages html, it does not show noindex. In fact, it shows index, follow. Majority of pages show the error and are not indexed by Google...Not sure why this is happening. The page below in search console shows the error above...
Technical SEO | | Sean_White_Consult0 -
Help! Website has lost all DA since being 301'd
Hi, We have redirected a small WP website to a new site and domain and it has lost all DA and PA. Does anyone know if there's a fix for this? Would reverting back to the old domain help? We redirect www.northcornwallgardens.co.uk to cornishlawns.co.uk Thank you James
Technical SEO | | CamperConnect140 -
Site went down and traffic hasn't recovered
Very curious situation. We have a network of sites. Sunday night one (only one) of our sites goes down, and since then we've seen a loss in traffic across all our sites!! Not only have we seen a loss of traffic, we also saw a loss of indexed pages. A complete drop off from 1.8 million to 1.3 million pages indexed. Does anyone know why one site outtage would affect the rest of them? And the indexed pages? Very confused. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | TMI.com0 -
How to find temporary redirects of existing site you don't control?
I am getting ready to move a clients site from another company. They have like 35 tempory redirects according to MOZ. Question is, how can I find out then current redirects so I can update everything for the new site? Do I need access to the current htaccess file to do this?
Technical SEO | | scott3150 -
Need help please with url guidelines.
Hi SEO PROS, I have a website and I am planing to change all the urls. I need to know what is the right way of making the urls. Here is some information. We are based in Brooklyn NY and we sell our services to Manhattan clients and Manhattan has few names. NY, NYC, Manhattan and NY. So by looking at my service area I came up with this url. http://www.signsny.com/brooklyn-ny/awnings this is my current url. http://www.signsny.com/sign-types/awnings-canopies-brooklyn-NYC. This is what I am planning to change it to. Please guide me to the right direction, so in future I don't have to re-do them again. Thanks Abie
Technical SEO | | signsny0 -
Help with onpage keyword optimization, site architecture, and how those aspects affect the SERPs.
Hey guys, I've made a post or two before, but my story is that I've been learning SEO for a while now and have only recently (in the last four months) had the opportunity to actually apply what I've been reading about. What I've learned while trying to put these things into practice is that it can be pretty tough sledding, even when it comes to basic elements like keywords and search results. Anyway, to the good stuff. I've been helping my brother's startup company in my spare time because I want them to do well. They're on the last legs of their series A funding and have no money to put towards SEO, content marketing or social, so I'm helping when and where I can for free. The company is Maluuba, a siri-like personal assistant app for Android with a ton of different domains. They launched at TechCrunch Disrupt and actually have a lot of traction and a fair amount of publicity, so I'm not exactly working with scraps, but I don't work with them in their offices and only really communicate with my brother, who is having a really hard time getting buy-in for some of the stuff I want them to do. Their initial website was pretty terrible, so my brother got the okay to redesign the site and together, we worked with a designer to implement the site I linked to. Because they have so many domains (search, social, organization) I thought creating specific pages along with a one homepage would be a good way to optimize for different things and funnel a wider audience to convert to the one macro goal of the site: getting people to download the app. The results haven't been exactly what I expected and I fear I didn't really implement what I still think is a good plan correctly. I've only tried to optimize the pages for a few keywords to start. The main keyword for the homepage and indeed the brand is 'personal assistant app' which is a fairly competitive keyword that I know have them ranking second for on Google CA. I used 'siri-alternative' as a secondary keyword, since that's how they label themselves in the Play Store. For the three other main (pages search, social, organization) I used 'personal assistant app' as a secondary keyword and tried to optimize each page for 'search app', 'social app' and 'organizer app', respectively. While I'm really quite proud that I managed to get a page ranking in the top three for our main keyword, I'm just as disappointed that it's the search page and not the homepage, mainly because I have no idea why it's happening. So, all of that to ask a few questions: Did I make a mistake by trying to add funnels to the site? Or did I just go about optimizing the pages incorrectly? Why does the search page rank really, really well for 'personal assistant app' while the other pages - including the one I intended to rank the highest for that term - lag behind? I'd guess that Google is indexing this page alone as the main representative of 'personal assistant app', but that wasn't my intention. I'm also not using any rel=canonical tags, if that matters. Also, this page has been flipping around in the 1-3 range in the SERPs for about a month, but I still haven't noticed any traffic from 'personal assistant app'. Alright, this is getting way to long. I'd very much appreciate any and all insights as to what I'm doing wrong or what I'm missing. It could be really obvious and thus make this post silly, but I really have read and tried to learn a lot. I just can't see what's going on here because I don't have any experience to compare it to. Thanks in advance for any help. Cheers, JD
Technical SEO | | JDMcNamara1 -
I'm redesigning a website which will have a new URL format. What's the best way to redirect all the old URLs to the new ones? Is there an automated, fast way to do this?
For example, the new URL will be: https://oregonoptimalhealth.com/about_us.html while the old one's were like this: http://www.oregonoptimalhealth.com/home/ooh/smartlist_1/services.html I have redirect almost 100 old pages to the correct new page. What's the best and easiest way to do this?
Technical SEO | | PolarisMarketing0 -
Google indexing less url's then containded in my sitemap.xml
My sitemap.xml contains 3821 urls but Google (webmaster tools) indexes only 1544 urls. What may be the cause? There is no technical problem. Why does Google index less URLs then contained in my sitemap.xml?
Technical SEO | | Juist0