Keywords going to Subdomain instead of targeted page(general landing page)
-
Why are some of my keywords going to subdomains instead of the more general/targeted landing page.
For example, on my ecommerce website, the keyword 'tempurpedic' is directing to the subdomain URL of a specific tempurpedic product page instead of the general landing page. The product has a page authority of 15 and the Tempurpedic landing pages with all the products has an authority of 31.
I have also noticed that my 'furniture stores in houston' keyword directs to my "occasional tables" URL! instead of a the much more targeted homepage.
Is there something I am missing here?
-
Ok as far as I understand your question, you are saying your website is ranking but for some keywords not the preferred page on the website is ranking.
I will answer as per the best of my understanding…
Ok this usually happens when you didn’t setup your website navigation and structure correctly. I would prefer to give another look to your internal linking strategy.
Another thing you can do is to get some quality links with anchor text around your keyword to your targeted pages.
Get an internal link from the ranked page to the page you want to rank in search engines against your key term.
I am not saying this will work 100% but most of the times it works for me…
-
You are correct about the sub-directory!
Sorry, these are the product pages:
keyword-flexsteel
keyword-flexsteel furniture
http://www.galleryfurniture.com/living-room/sofas/reclining-sofas/flexsteel-belmont-reclining-sofa
keyword-flex steel furniture
http://www.galleryfurniture.com/living-room/sofas/reclining-sofas/flexsteel-crosstown-reclining-sofa
And this would be the ideal landing URL for the keyword:
-
Firstly, I believe that you are mixing up the terms subdomain and subdirectory. A subdomain would be occasional-tables.example.com and a subdirectory would be example.com/occasional-tables, which I believe is what you mean.
There are a lot of reasons why Google could be sending it to a page other than the one you're attempting to rank for but it's really hard to tell without seeing the actual page.
-
Now you may be on to something! I don't know if this is the case because I was tracking 3 forms of flexsteel and each one directed to a different product page! But I can go into the products and add a parent link to the main flexsteel page to give it a bit more internal link value. Thanks for the tip.
-
Well you've got flexsteel as a keyword on two URL's. Google probably is putting more empahsis on the deeper page because it either existed longer OR has been crawled with higher factors for the keyword.
You may want to check out your other internal linking and make sure everything is going to the new product page. Chances are you have lots of internal links pointing to the deeper page, hence making it appear more authoritative on your site.
Check on that, then re-upload a new sitemap for a new crawl. Good luck!
-
Thanks for the response. I looked into that preferred domain, but it is not what I am looking for.
My issue is that keywords are being targeted to specific pages instead of general pages. For example:
Keyword- flexsteel
directed at product: /living-room/sofas/reclining-sofas/flexsteel-crosstown-reclining-sofa
instead of flexteel landing page: /flexsteel-furniture
-
You probably need to set your preferred domain in your Google Webmaster Tools.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en
See if that is what you are looking for.
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 many links to the same page can there be for each page?
I need to know if I can add more than 2 equal links on the same page, for example 1 link in the header, another in the body and one in the footer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jorgesep0 -
Blog On Subdomain - Do backlinks to the blog posts on Subdomain count as links for main site?
I want to put blog on my site. The IT department is asking that I use a subdomain (myblog.mysite.com) instead of a subfolder (mysite.com/myblog). I am worried b/c it was my understanding that any links I get to my blog posts (if on subdomain) will not count toward the main site (search engines would view almost as other website). The main purpose of this blog is to attract backlinks. That is why I prefer the subfolder location for the Blog. Can anyone tell me if I am thinking about this right? Another solution I am being offered is to use a reverse proxy. Thoughts? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ecerbone0 -
Different Header on Home Page vs Sub pages
Hello, I am an SEO/PPC manager for a company that does a medical detox. You can see the site in question here: http://opiates.com. My question is, I've never heard of it specifically being a problem to have a different header on the home page of the site than on the subpages, but I rarely see it either. Most sites, if i'm not mistaken, use a consistent header across most of the site. However, a person i'm working for now said that she has had other SEO's look at the site (above) and they always say that it is a big SEO problem to have a different header on the homepage than on the subpages. Any thoughts on this subject? I've never heard of this before. Thanks, Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Waismann0 -
Redirecting thin content city pages to the state page, 404s or 301s?
I have a large number of thin content city-level pages (possibly 20,000+) that I recently removed from a site. Currently, I have it set up to send a 404 header when any of these removed city-level pages are accessed. But I'm not sending the visitor (or search engine) to a site-wide 404 page. Instead, I'm using PHP to redirect the visitor to the corresponding state-level page for that removed city-level page. Something like: if (this city page should be removed) { header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rriot
header("Location:http://example.com/state-level-page")
exit();
} Is it problematic to send a 404 header and still redirect to a category-level page like this? By doing this, I'm sending any visitors to removed pages to the next most relevant page. Does it make more sense to 301 all the removed city-level pages to the state-level page? Also, these removed city-level pages collectively have very little to none inbound links from other sites. I suspect that any inbound links to these removed pages are from low quality scraper-type sites anyway. Thanks in advance!2 -
Site less than 20 pages shows 1,400+ pages when crawled
Hello! I’m new to SEO, and have been soaking up as much as I can. I really love it, and feel like it could be a great fit for me – I love the challenge of figuring out the SEO puzzle, plus I have a copywriting/PR background, so I feel like that would be perfect for helping businesses get a great jump on their online competition. In fact, I was so excited about my newfound love of SEO that I offered to help a friend who owns a small business on his site. Once I started, though, I found myself hopelessly confused. The problem comes when I crawl the site. It was designed in Wordpress, and is really not very big (part of my goal in working with him was to help him get some great content added!) Even though there are only 11 pages – and 6 posts – for the entire site, when I use Screaming Frog to crawl it, it sees HUNDREDS of pages. It stops at 500, because that is the limit for their free version. In the campaign I started here at SEOmoz, and it says over 1,400 pages have been crawled…with something like 900 errors. Not good, right? So I've been trying to figure out the problem...when I look closer in Screaming Frog, I can see that some things are being repeated over and over. If I sort by the Title, the URLs look like they’re stuck in a loop somehow - one line will have /blog/category/postname…the next line will have /blog/category/category/postname…and the next line will have /blog/category/category/category/postname…and so on, with another /category/ added each time. So, with that, I have two questions Does anyone know what the problem is, and how to fix it? Do professional SEO people troubleshoot this kind of stuff all of the time? Is this the best place to get answers to questions like that? And if not, where is? Thanks so much in advance for your help! I’ve enjoyed reading all of the posts that are available here so far, it seems like a really excellent and helpful community...I'm looking forward to the day when I can actually answer the questions!! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K.Walters0 -
Image Alt tags--always include the targeted keyword?
Question for all the SEO's out there. Do you always include your target keyword in the image alt tag? For example, if you had an article on osteoarthritis, and you included a photo of an old man, would you put "old man on a bench" or "old man suffering from osteoarthritis" -- even though you have no idea if the old man suffers from osteoarthritis?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Number of Indexed Pages are Continuously Going Down
I am working on online retail stores. Initially, Google have indexed 10K+ pages of my website. I have checked number of indexed page before one week and pages were 8K+. Today, number of indexed pages are 7680. I can't understand why should it happen and How can fix it? I want to index maximum pages of my website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
What causes internal pages to have a page rank of 0 if the home page is PR 5?
The home page PageRank is 5 but every single internal page is PR 0. Things I know I need to address each page has 300 links (Menu problem). Each article has 2-3 duplicates caused from the CMS working on this now. Has anyone else had this problem before? What things should I look out for to fix this issue. All internal linking is follow there is no page rank sculpting happening on the pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOBrent0