Ranking for keyword I don't optimize for & Other oddities
-
Hi Moz Community!
I've been working with a clients website for about a year now. They were hit with the original Panda update because of some spammy links from a shady SEO firm. We've made a decent climb back but not a full recovery. There are some weird things happening that I would love some insight into.
1. Ranking for keywords we don't optimize for:
I noticed some low keyword volume for a keyword term that is close to our main term, but is slightly different. We don't optimize for this term at all on our website. We rank third for this term, and actually show site links in the result, which doesn't happen for any of our other pages.
2. Index not found when doing site: search:
Other oddity is that when you search site:www.mywebsite.com, I see all the pages within the site except the homepage. Not sure whats going on here, but when I fetch the homepage in GWMT, it returns the homepage. When you query the homepage by itself, it also ranks.
Any help would be appreciated!
Regards,
J
-
A webpage can rank for more than one keyword and that's a good thing. Having the low volume keyword ranking well wouldn't hurt the main keyword's ranking. However it could be that Google's algorithm decided that the page is better suited for the lower-volume query. I would take another look at the page, including links and citations and see if you see something there.
For the homepage issue, it still sounds like a subdomain issue, especially because you see it when you search the root domain, but not the www subdomain.
-
Thanks All,
The issue with the lower traffic keyword is that the main keyword I was ranking for was receiving 20k avg. monthly searches and the new keyword receives 50 searches (using the keyword planner tool). So you can imagine, I used to be position #4 for the prime keyword, now I'm #19. So my traffic has dropped significantly.
My homepage uses the www, I used the site:www.mysite.com and my homepage does not show up, I have 57 results and have checked each SERP. When I use the site:http://mysite.com, my homepage shows up as the first result.
-
I noticed some low keyword volume for a keyword term that is close to our main term, but is slightly different. We don't optimize for this term at all on our website.
This is called "long tail traffic". Most of my traffic comes in for "terms that are close to my mail term but slightly different". I honestly make a living off of this stuff.
We rank third for this term, and actually show site links in the result, which doesn't happen for any of our other pages.
Awesome. Go out for beers.
Index not found when doing site: search:
This can happen when you have another page on the site that is optimized similar to the homepage - but a little better in the eyes of google. If you click to the end of the SERPs (if you have a small enough site) you might see that the homepage is filtered.
-
For the first question, Google has become pretty sophisticated in making connections, so ranking for a keyword similar to one you are optimizing for isn't unusual, especially a low search volume keyword that might not have much competition.
For the second question, it's hard to say without knowing the site, but did you do the site search that way, with the www? Is your homepage www or non www?
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
-
Is it OK that the root didn't have any internal links?
Hi guys; In a website with more than 20,000 indexed pages, Is it normally that homepage (root) didn't have any internal links, while other important pages have enough internal links? Consider that in a top menu in header of all pages, I added homepage link, so the home page link repeated on all indexed pages, but google didn't count it and the website technology is angular js thank you for helping me
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cafegardesh0 -
Why isn't Google caching our pages?
Hi everyone, We have a new content marketing site that allows anyone to publish checklists. Each checklist is being indexed by Google, but Google is not storing a cached version of any of our checklists. Here's an example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Checkli
https://www.checkli.com/checklists/ggc/a-girls-guide-to-a-weekend-in-south-beach Missing Cache:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DfFNPP6WBhsJ:https://www.checkli.com/checklists/ggc/a-girls-guide-to-a-weekend-in-south-beach+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us Why is this happening? How do we fix it? Is this hurting the SEO of our website.0 -
May integrating my main category page in the index page improve my ranking of main category keyword?
90% of our sales are made with products in one of our product categories.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
A search for main category keyword returns our root domain index page in google, not the category page.
I was wondering whether integrating the complete main category directly in the index page of the root domain and this way including much more relevant content for this main category keyword may have a positive impact on our google ranking for the main category keyword. Any thoughts?1 -
WordPress posts Title field inserts title into blog posts like a headline but doesn't ad H1 tag how to change?
I have a Wordpress website which is just using the Default theme, when I post in the blog, whatever I put in the "Title" field at the top of the editor is automatically is placed within the body of the blog post, like a headline, but it doesn't include any H1 tags that I can see. If I add my own headline within in the blog editor, it still inserts the Title like a headline. I am using the Yoast SEO Plugin and also write the meta title there, should I just leave the Wordpress title field blank so it doesn't insert into the blog post? Or is that inserted Title being recognized as an H1 even though I don't see h1 tags anywhere? Hope this isn't too confusing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO4leagalPA1 -
Title Tags & Keyword Order
Hi I've read various articles on this - some saying it's still important to have the keyword at the beginning of the title and some saying it's not a big factor anymore? Does anyone have an opinion on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
I'm I being penalize? I fell off SERP for main keyword
I have been making minor changes to my site like fixing 404 pages and adding site maps etc. I have ranked as high as 3rd for the query 'private equity firms' but now Im showing the site around the 10th page and some times never. any ideas what could be going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nicktaylor10 -
Method for Ranking fast low competition keywords.
I have a web site for tours & according to Moz there are many duplicates titles and description .So now in the process of making all the errors correct. already around 1500 pages indexed in Google.keywords competition from 135000 to 2400 respectively.still not any of keywords ranking for top 100 result in local search .already created Google place also. So i wanna show to my client few lower kws in 20 days in top 100 result at least .looking for expert advice , <colgroup><col width="163"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
Removing URLs in bulk when directory exclusion isn't an option?
I had a bunch of URLs on my site that followed the form: http://www.example.com/abcdefg?q=&site_id=0000000048zfkf&l= There were several million pages, each associated with a different site_id. They weren't very useful, so we've removed them entirely and now return a 404.The problem is, they're still stuck in Google's index. I'd like to remove them manually, but how? There's no proper directory (i.e. /abcdefg/) to remove, since there's no trailing /, and removing them one by one isn't an option. Is there any other way to approach the problem or specify URLs in bulk? Any insights are much appreciated. Kurus
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kurus1