HELP! How do I get Google to value one page over another (older) page that is ranking?

[Vacatia_SEO]

So I have a tactical question and I need mozzers.

I'll use widgets as an example:

1- My company used to sell widgets exclusively and we built thousands of useful, branded unique pages that sell widgets. We have thousands of pages that are ranking for widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-sale. (These pages have been live for almost 2 years)

2- We've shifted our focus to now renting widgets. We have about 100 pages focused on renting the same branded widgets. These pages have unique content and photos and can be found at widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-rent. (These pages have been live for about 2-3 months)

The problem is that when someone searches just for the brand name, the "for sale" pages dramatically outrank the "for rent" pages. Instead, I want them to find the "for rent" page. I don't want to redirect traffic from the "for sale" pages because someone might still be interested in buying (although as a company, we are super focused on renting).

Solutions?

• "nofollow" the "for sale" pages with the idea that Google will stop indexing "for sale" and start valuing "for rent" over it?
• Remove "for sale" from sitemap.

Help!!

[evolvingSEO]

Eric

I think there may be three main factors getting "for rent" to rank just brand searches (without "rent" or "buy")

• Internal architecture - if you link to 'for rent' more often and closer to the homepage more often, compared to 'buy' - you should send more authority to 'for rent' and maybe they will rank better. You can use a tool like Screaming Frog SEO spider to see how your internal linking is. Think if it like trying to optimize for users to internally click through to "for rent" more, and you'll sort of optimize architecture at the same time.

• External authority to those pages specifically - external links directly to those pages and people searching and clicking on those pages. In other words, link building and external traffic to those pages should help them grow in authority. Not sure if they are the type of page you can build links to directly, but you should be able to build links to pages that link to them - like External site-->article on your blog-->brand "for rent" page.

• Time - I think to some extent it will take time. Google needs to gain trust in these pages, crawl them multiple times, see users interacting with them etc etc. Set it up for success with the suggestions above, and then give it time!

[Vacatia_SEO]

Thanks Dan for the insight.

Yes, we'd like to capture both "for sale" and "for rent" keywords associated with the brand but the bigger word we want to capture is the brand name alone or the "for rent"=brand. The lowest priority is the "for sale" keywords. Obviously the brand will probably be no. 1 every time, but there's no reason we can't secure a first page spot for just the brand name and have the "for rent" brand page be the one that shows up.

how big is the market: 
for some brand names, pretty big, others, not so much, it fluctuates

how competitive:
lots of other companies are vying for the brand name, but there is at least one or two results on the first page that don't belong.

search volume:
not enormous but definitely the people we want to come to our site. but again, depending on the brand, the volume could be large

typical user:
probably looking to rent instead of buy

[evolvingSEO]

I think it's important to understand the options and the results they will cause:

• You could "noindex" the for sale page - it will still live on your site, it's just that no one will find it in Google.
• You can rel = canonical "for sale" -> "for rent" but technically you're not supposed to because the content is different. If it worked, it would basically achieve the same thing as the noindex anyway. It's supposed to pass value like a redirect, but I doubt it would since the content is different.

I think the hidden dilemma is in the fact you're trying to capture both "for sale" and "for rent" traffic - what are the keywords driving traffic to the far sale or for rent page? Maybe it's really a matter of getting both pages to rank for their respective keywords/intents and making it cleat to the user front and center on each page they can in fact both buy or rent. So the "for rent" page would clearly state "hey, did you know you can buy this too?"

I don't know how popular the keywords are too - this would help determine the overall strategy - knowing how big the market is, how competitive, the search volume - and what a typical user expects in the industry.

[Vacatia_SEO]

May I also add that the old "for sale" pages have an incredible high bounce rate when it's the first page people see.

And as I search further, I wonder if rel=canonical is the way to go. The pages are very similar but have a very different focus. Regardless, I want Google to show the "for rent" page without completely turning off the functionality of the "for sale" page.

Thanks for serving as my sounding board moz. i may just answer this question myself