Google Search Results Flip-Flop
-
For a site we manage, Google can’t seem to decide which of two pages to present for a search for “skid steer attachments.” Almost weekly, it flip-flops from the home page to an interior page (which is a shopping cart category page that we have not actually optimized for the phrase.) The site is berlon.com.
Have any of you had a similar experience and, if so, how did you address it?
I’ve attached a Moz screen shot that shows the changes.
-
Hi, had a similar problem just last week and solved it by strengthening the interior page ranking factors. Here's how:
- my page was domain.com/services/page, changed that to domain.com/keyword/page on both the URL and breadcrumbs (that becoming brand -> keyword -> page).
- better internal linking, added a couple of internal links with or in context near the keyword throughout the website's news section and corporate pages linking to the interior page.
Hope this helps you
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
-
Google indexing is slowing down?
I have up to 20 million unique pages, and so far I've only submitted about 30k of them on my sitemap. We had a few load related errors during googles initial visits, and it thought some were duplicates, but we fixed all that. We haven't gotten a crawl related error for 2 weeks now. Google appears to be indexing fewer and fewer urls every time it visits. Any ideas why? I am not sure how to get all our pages indexed if its going to operate like this... love some help thanks! HnJaXSM.png
Technical SEO | | RyanTheMoz0 -
Recovering from a Google penalty
Hi there, So about 3.5 weeks ago I noticed my website (www.authenticstyle.co.uk) had gone from ranking in second place for our main key phrase "web design dorset" to totally dropping off the SERP's for that particular search phrase - it's literally no where to be seen. It seems that other pages of my website still rank, but the homepage. I then noticed that I had an unread alert in my Google Search Console account to say that a staging site we were hosting on a subdomain (the subdomain was domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk) had hacked content - it was a couple of PDF files with weird file names. The strange thing is we'd taken this staging site down a few weeks earlier, BUT one of my staff had left an A record set up in our Cloudflare account pointing to that staging server - they'd forgotten to remove it when removing the staging site. I then removed the A record, myself and submitted a reconsideration request on Google Search Console (which I still haven't received confirmation of) in the hope of everything sorting itself out. Since then I've also grabbed a Moz Pro account to try and dig a little deeper, but without any success. We have a few warnings for old 404's, some missing meta descs on some pages, and some backlinks that have accumulated over time that have hghish spam rating, but nothing major - nothing that would warrant a penalty as far as I can tell. From what I can make out, we've been issued a penalty on our homepage only, but I don't understand why we would get penalised for hacked content if that site domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk no longer existed (would it just be due to that erroneous A record we forgot to remove?). I contacted a few freelance SEO experts and one came back to me saying I'd done everything correctly and that I should see our site appearing again in a few days after submitting the reconsideration request. Its been 3 weeks and nothing. I'm at a huge loss as to how my site can recover from this. What would you recommend? I even tried getting our homepage to rank for a variation of "web design dorset", but it seems our homepage has been penalised for anything with "dorset" in the keyphrase. Any pointers would be HUGELY appreciated. Thanks in advance! Will
Technical SEO | | wsmith7270 -
Errors In Search Console
Hi All, I am hoping someone might be able to help with this. Last week one of my sites dropped from mid first day to bottom of page 1. We had not been link building as such and it only seems to of affected a single search term and the ranking page (which happens to be the home page). When I was going through everything I went to search console and in crawl errors there are 2 errors that showed up as detected 3 days before the drop. These are: wp-admin/admin-ajax.php showing as response code 400 and also xmlrpc.php showing as response code 405 robots.txt is as follows: user-agent: * disallow: /wp-admin/ allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php Any help with what is wrong here and how to fix it would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | DaleZon0 -
How many serp results for a domain.
I thought this one was carved into stone, max number of results from the same domain in SERP is... two. Or... three?! I was searching for some familiar keywords and found three results from the same domain, isn't that... unusual?
Technical SEO | | max.favilli1 -
Google displaying "Items 1-9" before the description in the Search Results
We see our pages coming up in Google with the category page/product numbers in front of our descriptions. For example: Items 1 - 24 of 86 (and than the descriptions follows). Our website is magento based. Is there a fix for this that anyone knows of? Is there method of stopping Google from adding this on to the front of our Meta Description?
Technical SEO | | DutchG0 -
Google's Omitted Results - Attempt to De-Index
We're trying to get webpages from our QA site out of Google's index. We've inserted the NOINDEX tags. Google now shows only 3 results (down from 196,000), however, they offer a link to "show omitted results" at the bottom of the page. (A) Did we do something wrong? or (B) were we successful with our NOINDEX but Google will offer to show omitted results anyway? Please advise! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BVREID0 -
Search result pages - noindex but auto follow?
Hi guys, I don't index my search pages, and currently my pages are tagged name="robots" content="noindex"> Do I need to specify follow or will it automatically be done? Thanks Cyto
Technical SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Google Local Results and URL Titles
After searching for (city name) (business type) a number of my competitor's sites come up with the title of their web page as the results (including geographic descriptors). However, my site is listed by name and does not reflect our URL title. How is this possible (did someone manually change the title of our listing?) and how can I change this back so that the title includes a geo descriptor? Do I simply edit the listing under google places or will this have a negative effect on our rankings?
Technical SEO | | helliottlaw0