Understanding why our new page doesn't rank. Internal link structure to blame? + understand canonical pages more.

[isaac663]

Hi guys.  Sorry it's an essay...BUT, i think a lot of you will find this an interesting question.

This question is in 2 (related) parts, and I imagine it would be an 'advanced' SEO question.  Hoping you guys can help bring some real insight  Always amazed at the quality for this forum/ community.

**Context...  **

We had a duplicate content issue caused by this page and it's product permutations, so we placed canonical tags on all the product permutations to solve it.  Worked a treat.

However, we now have more **product ranges.  **We now sell Diaries, Notebooks & Music books, which are clearly different from one another.  So...we've placed canonical tags on all the product permutations leading back to the 'parent' theme.

In other words, all the diary permutations 'lead back' to the diary page.  All the notebooks permutations 'lead back' to the main notebook page.  So on and so forth.

Make sense so far?

Context end.....

Issue.

Amazingly our Diary page outranks our notebook pagefor the search term 'Design your own Notebook'.  The notebook page is well optimised for this search term, and the diary page avoids the word 'notebook' altogether (so no keyword cannibalisation going on).

Possible reason?

Our Diary page has a vast amount of internal links to it throughout our site.  The notebook page has only a few. Could this be the issue?  If so, what reading/ blogs/ content/ tools would you recommend to help understand and solve this problem?  i.e) Better understanding internal link structure for SEO.

2nd part of the question (in the context of internal linking for SEO).

When there are internal links to a page with a conical tag does that 'count' towards the 'parent page', or simply towards that specific page?

I really hope that makes sense.  If it's clear as mud just shout.

Isaac.

EDIT:  All pages in question have been indexed since we added these changes to the site.

[isaac663]

Ok yes.  Thank you!  All makes sense.

Long term we'd love to have people landing on the notebook page for the appropriate search term.  It would make a nicer customer journey, and the user would feel like they were 'in the right place'.

But short term as you say, we'll focus on what's ranking and go with that momentum.

Thanks again!

Isaac.

[montana.marsden]

Google definitely sees "design your own notebook" and "design your own diary" as two different searches, but Google looks at the "intent" behind a search, not just the keywords behind the search. The "intent" for the "design your own notebook" and "design your own diary" are very similar, both are related to getting a type of custom designed book that you can write in (the Knowledge Graph video discusses this).

Though your diary page may not have any external links pointing to it that's not the only thing google's Algorithm looks for. Maybe your diary page has more user data showing a positive experience behind it? Maybe your link structure has identified it as more important than your notebook page? There really could be a lot of reasons why it's identifying the diary page as better than your notebook page.

I used Moz's Open Site Explorer tool and took a quick look at your different pages and I found that your diary page has a page authority of 21 and your notebook page has a page authority of 1 (which is automatically given no matter what). So there's quite a bit of difference as far as Moz is concerned (and you can pretty confidently say "as far as Google is concerned") between which should be shown.

From a pure marketing perspective (I'm going to take off the SEO hat and just talk about driving results now), you want to look at the end goal. If I was in your shoes, I wouldn't forget about your notebook page (I'd definitely keep working on helping it rank better) but I would focus most of my efforts on maximizing the potential of your page that's ranking. Focus on conversion optimization, get yourself some gold stars using schema/reviews, work on getting more links to that page. It's about using the current momentum you instead of stopping and trying to start from scratch.

Hopefully that helps!

-Jacob

[isaac663]

Canonical answer makes perfect sense.... thank you so much!

Can I just clarify something?

What do you mean by the diary page has more authority than the notebook page?  From back links?  Or from internal link structure?  (I didn't think we had any back links to these pages you see).

I'm personally convinced that Google sees 'design your own notebook' and 'design your own diary' as significantly different searches.  2 reasons.  The huge difference in the SERP results for those two searches, and, that they belong to different groups in Ad words.

One problem I've identified is that we do technically have a keyword cannibalisation issues.  We have the word notebook in the 'Diary - Notebook' drop down.

Out side of removing these words, is there anything else we should look at on site to help the notebook page rank for appropriate search terms?  Or would you suggest optimising the diary page for both notebook and diaries terms?  Perhaps as a more short term solution?

Again, thank you for your response.  This is such an empowering place

Isaac.

[montana.marsden]

Answer to why diary page is showing up instead of notebook:

I would say that the reason your diary page is showing up in the SERPS (even when people are searching for "notebooks") is because the keywords "notebook" and "diary" are part of the same Knowledge Graph and can sometimes be synonyms.

Beyond this your http://www.toaddiaries.co.uk/design-your-own/diaries page seems to have more authority then your notebook page, so it really is "cannibalizing" the "notebook" keyword. It's not a horrible thing to happen, we have the same thing occurring with our website (our "lawn mowing" page cannibalizes our "lawn care" page). Because the "intent" can be very similar for the two keywords our conversion rate doesn't suffer, I'd assume the same (or something similar) for yours.

Answer to the canonical tag/internal linking situation:

When you place a canonical tag on a page you're directing google's crawlers to identify it the same as the page it's pointing to. So if Google's algorithm is identifying your internal linking as a positive it will count towards the page your canonical tag is pointing to. Here's a pretty solid article on it (link).

Hopefully that helps.

-Jacob