Investigating Google's treatment of different pages on our site - canonicals, addresses, and more.
-
Hey all -
I hesitate to ask this question, but have spent weeks trying to figure it out to no avail. We are a real estate company and many of our building pages do not show up for a given address.
I first thought maybe google did not like us, but we show up well for certain keywords 3rd for Houston office space and dallas office space, etc. We have decent DA and inbound links, but for some reason we do not show up for addresses.
An example, 44 Wall St or 44 Wall St office space, we are no where to be found. Our title and description should allow us to easily picked up, but after scrolling through 15 pages (with a ton of non relevant results), we do not show up. This happens quite a bit. I have checked we are being crawled by looking at 44 Wall St TheSquareFoot and checking the cause. We have individual listing pages (with the same titles and descriptions) inside the buildings, but use canonical tags to let google know that these are related and want the building pages to be dominant. I have worked though quite a few tests and can not come up with a reason. If we were just page 7 and never moved it would be one thing, but since we do not show up at all, it almost seems like google is punishing us. My hope is there is one thing that we are doing wrong that is easily fixed. I realize in an ideal world we would have shorter URLs and other nits and nats, but this feels like something that would help us go from page 3 to page 1, not prevent us from ranking at all.
Any thoughts or helpful comments would be greatly appreciated.
http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10005/lower-manhattan/44-wall-st/44-wall-street
We do show up one page 1 for this building - http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10036/midtown/1501-broadway, but is the exception. I have tried investigating any differences, but am quite baffled.
-
Hi Atticus,
Just want to clarify that you are not seeking actual local rankings for this, as rental buildings are considered ineligible business models per Google's Local Business Information Guidelines which read:
Rental or for-sale properties, such as vacation homes or vacant apartments, are not eligible to be listed on Google Maps and should not be verified. Instead, verify the business information for your sales or leasing office or offices. If you have a property with an on-site office, you may verify that office location.
So, if Local is out due to the business model, then this becomes a purely organic puzzle. Google's treatment of a query like '44 Wall St' is going to be varied, due to the lack of specificity of such a query. They are not sure why you are looking for this address and the results I see consist of a variety of answers on Google's part including Mapquest results, some attorneys that work there, some rental offices, etc. In other words, the results are a hodgepodge.
"44 Wall St office space" is a much clearer query, in terms of its intent. Competition looks extremely stiff for this, and searching from California, I see you coming up on page 3 of Google's organic results. Moving up in a situation like that is likely going to result from the typical organic factors (authority, age, activity, freshness, etc.) If you're not duplicating content or building bad links, then it's probably not a penalty - just a competitive environment.
I'm hoping you'll receive further feedback from the community on this!
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
-
Having problem with multiple ccTLD sites, SERP showing different sites on different region
Hi everyone, We have more than 20 websites for different region and all the sites have their specific ccTLD. The thing is we are having conflict in SERP for our English sites and almost all the English sites have the same content I would say 70% of the content is duplicating. Despite having a proper hreflang, I see co.uk results in (Google US) and not only .co.uk but also other sites are showing up (xyz.in, xyz.ie, xyz.com.au)The tags I'm using are below, if the site is for the US I'm using canonical and hreflang tag :https://www.xyz.us/" />https://www.xyz.us/" hreflang="en-us" />and for the UK siteshttps://www.xyz.co.uk/" />https://www.xyz.co.uk/" hreflang="en-gb" />I know we have ccTLD so we don't have to use hreflang but since we have duplicate content so just to be safe we added hreflang and what I have heard/read that there is no harm if you have hreflang (of course If implemented properly).Am I doing something wrong here? Or is it conflicting due to canonicals for the same content on different regions and we are confusing Google so (Google showing the most authoritative and relevant results)Really need help with this.Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shahryar890 -
Why is my website not ranking for it's brand name in SERPs but has been indexed by Google?
The website https://christchurch.crowneplaza.com has been live for a couple of months but is not being found in Google search results - even when searching for it's own brand name 'crowne plaza christchurch.' Google has indexed the site - but we are still not showing - https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fchristchurch.crowneplaza.com&rlz=1C1NHXL_enNZ735NZ735&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58j69i59l2j69i65.896j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Any ideas as to why? I think it may be because their are two versions of the site, http and https, both with their own rel=canonical tags. Could this be the cause? Any help much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Timmy30 -
I currently have a canonical tag pointing to a different url for single page categories on eCommerce site. Is this wrong ?
Hi Mozzers, I have a query regarding canonical tags on my eCommerce site.. Basically on my category pages whereby I have more than 1 page, I currently use next/prev rel and also have a canonical tag pointing to the View all version of that page. This is believe is correct.(see example - http://goo.gl/2gz6LV However, from looking at the view source on my other pages, I have noticed I have canonical tags on all my category pages which are only a single page and these canonicaltag are pointing to a different url. I enclose an example . Please advise Category page - http://goo.gl/Pk4zYl This is where the canonical tag points to - http://goo.gl/EwKv26 Another example Category Page - http://goo.gl/4gWTdD This is where the canonical tag for that page points to http://goo.gl/qm4HV7 Should I either make sure that categories that are only 1 page , don't have a canonical tag at all ? or do I have a canonical tag on say every page on my website for safety pointing to the main url for that page. The later, I imagine would be a belt and braces approach but I don't want to screw up anything if it's not advised? Please help/ Kind regards Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Why isn't my site being indexed by Google?
Our domain was originally pointing to a Squarespace site that went live in March. In June, the site was rebuilt in WordPress and is currently hosted with WPEngine. Oddly, the site is being indexed by Bing and Yahoo, but is not indexed at all in Google i.e. site:example.com yields nothing. As far as I know, the site has never been indexed by Google, neither before nor after the switch. What gives? A few things to note: I am not "discouraging search engines" in WordPress Robots.txt is fine - I'm not blocking anything that shouldn't be blocked A sitemap has been submitted via Google Webmaster Tools and I have "fetched as Google" and submitted for indexing - No errors I've entered both the www and non-www in WMT and chose a preferred There are several incoming links to the site, some from popular domains The content on the site is pretty standard and crawlable, including several blog posts I have linked up the account to a Google+ page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jtollaMOT0 -
Help my site it's not being indexed
Hello... We have a client, that had arround 17K visits a month... Last september he hired a company to do a redesign of his website....They needed to create a copy of the site on a different subdomain on another root domain... so I told them to block that content in order to not affect my production site, cause it was going to be an exact replica of the content but different design.... The developmet team did it wrong and blocked the production site (using robots.txt), so my site lost all it's organica traffic, which was 85-90% of the total traffic and now only get a couple of hundreds visits a month... First I thought we had been somehow penalized, however when I the other site recieving new traffic and being indexed i realized so I switched the robots.txt and created 301 redirect from the subdomain to the production site. After resending sitemaps, links to google+ and many things I can't get google to reindex my site.... when i do a site:domain.com search in google I only get 3 results. Its been now almost 2 month and honestly dont know what to do.... Any help would be greatly appreciated Thanks Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0 -
Is 301 redirecting your index page to the root '/' safe to do or do you end up in an endless loop?
Hi I need to tidy up my home page a little, I have some links to our index.html page but I just want them to go to the root '/' so I thought I could 301 redirect it. However is this safe to do? I'm getting duplicate page notifications in my analytic reportings tools about the home page and need a quick way to fix this issue. Many thanks in advance David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
Similar sites on same IP address
Hello, A client has a small number (3) of large price comparison sites which have been launched on separate subdomains - BUT all on the same hosting IP address. The roll out of the sites was not ideal from an SEO perspective - as basically cloned versions of the sites were initially launched and indexed - and are only now being customised i.e. unique content added to each of the category and sub category pages. The first site initially got some traffic - and so did the 2nd in the early days - but then they both bombed (especially number 2). So we think there has probably been some kind of slap / sandboxing. We are starting to see some very early signs of recovery now some months after. My questions is - would it be a wise move to migrate each of the sites to a separate IP address as we start to evolve and optimise each site. Or are they ok to be left on the same hosting / IP address? The sites in question are : shop.deliaonline.com shop.ivillage.co.uk rewards.bestforfilm.com Thanks in advance for your help. Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichBestSEO0 -
Can literally any site get 'burned'?
Just curious what people think. The SEOMOZ trust on my site has gone up, all while Google is dropping us in rankings for lots of keywords. Just curious if this can happen to anyone or once you are 100% 'trusted' you're good. We went from 120,000 page views down to about 50,000. All while doubling content, improving the design(at least from a user perspective), and getting more natural links. Seems counter intuitive to Google's mantra of ranking quality. I would guess 'authority' sites never get hit by these updates right? So when you make it you've made it.(at least from a dropping like a rock perspective, obviously you have to keep working). I'm guessing we just need a bunch more quality links but would hate to work on building links, quality content, trust etc for it to be something so finicky long term.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | astahl110