Google serving wrong page...
-
Hi,
When you Google: "Los Angeles divorce attorney", you will see this site on the 5th page of the SERPS: www.berenjifamilylaw.com/blog/.
For some reason, Google is serving the BLOG page as opposed to the homepage. This has been going on now for several weeks.
Any tips on how to fix this? Obviously, the Homepage is more relevant and has more links going to it, so not sure why it's happening.
Would you just leave it alone? Would you use robots.txt to block Google from crawling the BLOG post page?
Thanks.
-
My advice here is to get a good strong Scotch, a pack of headache tablets and settle in for the night - it sounds like one holy mess!
The only thing I can really suggest is to just try and tackle one element at a time. The fact that so much has gone on with the sites, would suggest to me that Google has lost track of where it is all up to.
Start at the beginning (wherever that is!) and work through sorting one issue at a time.
-Andy
-
Hi Andy,
Great answer. There is definitely a "trust" issue going on. This client had two websites running in the past, and his previous marketing team did a lot of spammy stuff.
Moreover, he used his business name to promote two different types of law, family law and personal injury. Here's the weird part. On GWT, Google will serve his family law site for the personal injury related terms. That makes no sense to me because there is no PI content on the family law site. Perhaps Google serves it b/c of the company name association.
Even more strange, Google serves the HP for "Los Angeles divorce lawyer," but NOT for "Los Angeles divorce attorney" - (even though it serves the HP for divorce attorney Los Angeles).
As far as local search is concerned, that's a HUGE mess. Over the past 10 years they had different business names, different addresses, and the SAME phone number. Whenever they made a change, they wouldn't fix the old listings. They simply created a NEW layer of listings to go over it (does that make sense?).
So you will see his biz name and phone number associated with two different practice areas and two different addresses. You will also find his old business name associated with his new number.
I purchased MozLocal and Yext to help speed it up, but so far there's no movement.
Oh, and they also had multiple G+ business pages going at once.
Any more advice would be appreciated. Thanks.
-
You could noindex, follow the blog page, but I tend to see these issues fixed with some internal linking, just to remind Google which page you want to be prominent.
That said, the fact it is page 5 makes me wonder if there is a penalty / trust thing going on here as well. It wouldn't be the first time I have seen this happen.
I would also check your local search setup and make sure everything is completed.
- Keywords
- Google My Business
- Citations & Mentions
- Backlinks
- Reviews
- Local Directories & Business Listings
- Google Data Highlighter / Schema Markup
- Consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number)
-Andy
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
-
My product category pages are not being indexed on google can someone help?
My website has been indexed on google and all of its pages can be found on google except for the product category pages - which are where we want our traffic heading to, so this is a big problem for us. Our website is www.skirtinguk.com And an example of a page that isn't being indexed is https://www.skirtinguk.com/product-category/mdf-skirting-board/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chelseaskirtinguk0 -
Magento 1.9 SEO. I have product pages with identical On Page SEO score in the 90's. Some pull up Google page 1 some won't pull up at all. I am searching for the exact title on that page.
I have a website built on Magento 1.9. There are approximately 290,000 part numbers on the site. I am sampling Google SERP results. About 20% of the keywords show up on page 1 position 5 thru 10. 80% don't show up at all. When I do a MOZ page score I get high 80's to 90's. A page score of 89 on one part # may show up on page one, An identical page score on a different part # can't be found on Google. I am searching for the exact part # in the page title. Any thoughts on what may be going on? This seems to me like a Magento SEO issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTOPDS0 -
If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?
Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress1 -
Our client's web property recently switched over to secure pages (https) however there non secure pages (http) are still being indexed in Google. Should we request in GWMT to have the non secure pages deindexed?
Our client recently switched over to https via new SSL. They have also implemented rel canonicals for most of their internal webpages (that point to the https). However many of their non secure webpages are still being indexed by Google. We have access to their GWMT for both the secure and non secure pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
Should we just let Google figure out what to do with the non secure pages? We would like to setup 301 redirects from the old non secure pages to the new secure pages, but were not sure if this is going to happen. We thought about requesting in GWMT for Google to remove the non secure pages. However we felt this was pretty drastic. Any recommendations would be much appreciated.0 -
Requesting New Custom URL for Google+ Local Business Page
This question is about the new custom URLs for Google+ Local Business pages: Has anyone heard any success stories with requesting a custom URL different than the two reserved ones offered by Google via contacting a Google Rep by phone? And what advantages might there be for a local business to go with a very long custom URL such asgoogle.com/+rosenbergAndDalgrenLLPFortLauderdale as opposed to just google.com/+RdLawyers? Does having the city name in the URL offer any <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> benefit? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gbkevin0 -
Google Webmaster Tools > HTML Improvements > 301 Moved Permanently pages - how did they even get there?
Hello experts! I'm going through my Google Webmaster Tools > HTML Improvements looking for pages with duplicate meta descriptions/titles that I can fix. And I noticed there are about 60 pages odd looking page titles that have duplicate meta descriptions, which are also noted as: 301 Moved Permanently Moved Permanently The document has moved here. Apache Server at sports When I click on the link to see the page names, all of them are pages we never created. The pages are all sports blog related. Here are few examples: http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/justin-tuck-blog.html http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/unlimited-potential-project-blog.html http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/left-handed-baseball-glove-blog.html http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/adjustable-basketball-hoops-blog.html how did they get on our site? Is this some sort of malicious attack? Most of them are sports related blog looking names. I just don't know how these pages could have been created. 2) is this hurting us with Google?3) Can you tell when the page was created?Thanks ron xEtX3op.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Google Ranking Wrong Page
The company I work for started with a website targeting one city. Soon after I started SEO for them, they expanded to two cities. Optimization was challenging, but we managed to rank highly in both cities for our keywords. A year or so later, the company expanded to two new locations, so now 4 total. At the time, we realized it was going to be tough to rank any one page for four different cities, so our new SEO strategy was to break the website into 5 sections or minisites consisting of 4 city-targeted sites, and our original site which will now be branded as more of a national website. Our URL structures now look something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cpapciak
www.company.com
www.company.com/city-1
www.company.com/city-2
www.company.com/city-3
www.company.com.city-4 Now, in the present time, all is going well except for our original targeted city. The problem is that Google keeps ranking our original site (which is now national) instead of the new city-specific site we created. I realize that this is probably due to all of the past SEO we did optimizing for that city. My thoughts are that Google is confused as to which page to actually rank for this city's keyword terms and I was wondering if canonical tags would be a possible solution here, since the pages are about 95% identical. Anyone have any insight? I'd really appreciate it!0 -
Wrong page being ranked
Hi there, This seems a bit of a strange one, I have a particular keyword which I am trying to rank for, all internal links with the appropriate anchor text are pointing to the page I want to rank for, for this particular keyword, all external links are pointing to the page I want to rank for, for this particular keyword, however Google is ranking another page on my website for this keyword and the bizarre things is the page which is being ranked is a .PDF I am really not sure what else to do to give Google the hint that they are ranking the wrong page, any ideas? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780