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
-
Change URL or use Canonicals and Redirects?
We just completed a conclusive a/b test on a client's landing page. The new page saw a 30% bump in conversions, yay! Now what? Option 1: Change the url of the new page to that of the old page, retire the old page. Option 2: Redirect the old page and anything that was pointing to it to the new page, make the new page the canonical. I'm afraid of option 1 because I think Google's WTF penalty will be a bit harsher than option 2, but I wanted to sanity check that here. Any thoughts or experienced advice would be very appreciated!
Technical SEO | | LindsayDayton0 -
Finding websites that don't have meta descriptions
Hi everyone, as a way to find new business leads I thought about targeting websites that have poor meta descriptions or where they are simply missing. A quick look at SERPs shows this is still a major issue for many businesses. Is there any way I can quickly find pages for which meta description is lacking? Thank you! Best regards, Florian
Technical SEO | | agencepicnic0 -
Why Doesn't All Structured Data Show in Google Webmaster?
We have more than 80k products, each of them with data-vocabulary.org markup on them, but only 17k are being reported as having the markup in Google Webmaster (GW). If I run a page that GW isn't showing as having the structure data in the structured data testing tool (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets), it passes. Any thoughts on why this would be happening? Is it because we should switch from data-vocabulary.org to schema.org? Example of page that GW is reporting that has structured data: https://www.etundra.com/restaurant-equipment/refrigeration/display-cases/coutnertop/vollrath-40862-36-inch-cubed-glass-refrigerated-display-cabinet/ Example of page that isn't showing in GW as having structured data: https://www.etundra.com/kitchen-supplies/cutlery/sandwich-spreaders/mundial-w5688-4-and-half-4-and-half-sandwich-spreader/
Technical SEO | | eTundra0 -
Changing URL of posts
HI, I need to change the urls and permalink structure of my blogposts. How I have to deal all this with google? Do I have to re-submit the pages to google with fetch as google? Will google display duplicate content of the same article ( having changed the url) or will it automatically replace the old url with the new ones? Tx for your support guys!
Technical SEO | | tourtravel0 -
Inconsistent page titles in SERP's
I encountered a strange phenomenon lately and I’d like to hear if you have any idea what’s causing it. For the past couple of weeks I’ve seen some our Google rankings getting unstable. While looking for a cause, I found that for some pages, Google results display another page title than the actual meta title of the page. Examples http://www.atexopleiding.nl Meta title: Atex cursus opleider met ruim 40 jaar ervaring - Atexopleiding.nl Title in SERP: Atexopleiding.nl: Atex cursus opleider met ruim 40 jaar ervaring http://www.reedbusinessopleidingen.nl/opleidingen/veiligheid/veiligheidskunde Meta title: Opleiding Veiligheidskunde, MBO & HBO - Reed Business Opleidingen Title in SERP: Veiligheidskunde - Reed Business Opleidingen http://www.pbna.com/vca-examens/ Meta title: Behaal uw VCA diploma bij de grootste van Nederland - PBNA Title in SERP: VCA Examens – PBNA I’ve looked in the source code, fetched some pages as Googlebot in WMT, but the title shown in the SERP doesn’t even exist in the source code. Now I suspect this might have something to do with the “cookiewall” implemented on our sites. Here’s why: Cookiewall was implemented end of January The problem didn’t exist until recently, though I can’t pinpoint an exact date. Problem exists on both rbo.nl, atexopleiding.nl & pbna.com, the latter running on Silverstripe CMS instead of WP. This rules out CMS specific causes. The image preview in the SERPS of many pages show the cookie alert overlay However, I’m not able to technically prove that the cookiescript causes this and I’d like to rule out other any obvious causes before I "blame it on the cookies" :). What do you think?
Technical SEO | | RBO0 -
How can I see the SEO of a URL? I need to know the progress of a specific landing-page of my web. Not a keyword, an url please. Thanks.
I need to know the evolution on SEO of a specific landing-page (an URL) of my web. Not a keyword, a url. Thanks. (Necesito saber si es posible averiguar el progreso de una URL específica en el posicionamiento de Google. Es decir, lo que hace SEOmoz con las palabras clave pero al revés. Yo tengo una url concreta que quiero posicionar en las primeras posiciones de Google pero quiero ver cómo va progresando en función a los cambios que le voy aplicando. Muchas gracias)
Technical SEO | | online_admiral0 -
What's the best URL Structure if my company is in multiple locations or cities?
I have read numerous intelligent, well informed responses to this question but have yet to hear a definitive answer from an authority. Here's the situation. Let's say I have a company who's URL is www.awesomecompany.com who provides one service called 'Awesome Service' This company has 20 franchises in the 20 largest US cities. They want a uniform online presence, meaning they want their design to remain consistent across all 20 domains. My question is this; what's the best domain or url structure for these 20 sites? Subdomain - dallas.awesomecompany.co Unique URL - www.dallasawesomecompany.com Directory - www.awesomecompany.com/dallas/ Here's my thoughts on this question but I'm really hoping someone b*tch slaps me and tells me I'm wrong: Of these three potential solutions these are how I would rank them and why: Subdomains Pros: Allows me to build an entire site so if my local site grows to 50+ pages, it's still easy to navigate Allows me to brand root domain and leverage brand trust of root domain (let's say the franchise is starbucks.com for instance) Cons: This subdomain is basically a brand new url in google's eyes and any link building will not benefit root domain. Directory Pros Fully leverages the root domain branding and fully allows for further branding If the domain is an authority site, ranking for sub pages will be achieved much quicker Cons While this is a great solution if you just want a simple map listing and contact info page for each of your 20 locations, what if each location want's their own "about us" page and their own "Awesome Service" page optimized for their respective City (i.e. Awesome Service in Dallas)? The Navigation and potentially the URL is going to start to get really confusing and cumbersome for the end user. Think about it, which is preferable?: dallas.awesomcompany.com/awesome-service/ www.awesomecompany.com/dallas/awesome-service (especially when www.awesomecompany.com/awesome-service/ already exists Unique URL Pros Potentially quicker rankings achieved than a subdomain if it's an exact match domain name (i.e. dallasawesomeservice.com) Cons Does not leverage the www.awesomecompany.com brand Could look like an imposter It is literally a brand new domain in Google's eyes so all SEO efforts would start from scratch Obviously what goes without saying is that all of these domains would need to have unique content on them to avoid duplicate content penalties. I'm very curious to hear what you all have to say.
Technical SEO | | BrianJGomez0 -
We changed the URL structure 10 weeks ago and Google hasn't indexed it yet...
We recently modified the whole URL structure on our website, which resulted in huge amount of 404 pages changing them to nice human readable urls. We did this in the middle of March - about 10 weeks ago... We used to have around 5000 404 pages in the beginning, but this number is decreasing slowly. (We have around 3000 now). On some parts of the website we have also set up a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, to avoid showing a 404 page thus making the “indexing transmission”, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. We've lost a significant amount of traffic, because of the URL changes, as Google removed the old URLs, but hasn’t indexed our new URLs yet. Is there anything else we can do to get our website indexed with the new URL structure quicker? It might also be useful to know that we are a page rank 4 and have over 30,000 unique users a month so I am sure Google often comes to the site quite often and pages we have made since then that only have the new url structure are indexed within hours sometimes they appear in search the next day!
Technical SEO | | jack860