Google swapped our website's long standing ranking home page for a less authoritative product page?
-
Our website has ranked for two variations of a keyword, one singular & the other plural in Google at #1 & #2 (for over a year). Keep in mind both links in serps were pointed to our home page. This year we targeted both variations of the keyword in PPC to a products landing page(still relevant to the keywords) within our website.
After about 6 weeks, Google swapped out the long standing ranked home page links (p.a. 55) rank #1,2 with the ppc directed product page links (p.a. 01) and dropped us to #2 & #8 respectively in search results for the singular and plural version of the keyword.
Would you consider this swapping of pages temporary, if the volume of traffic slowed on our product page?
-
Hi Keri and Thanks for your inquiry. We have kept our focus on the content swap and moved forward with our link building strategy to accommodate the swap. Everything seems to be holding strong at this point. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. ~ Brian
-
I don't have much else help to add to this question, but wondering how things are looking now, and if anything has changed in the past couple of weeks.
-
Hello Keri and thank you! The Content Swap #4. I should have put it to a test a few weeks ago We did change the title tag for the homepage & tweeked the the product page title (just a little). I over looked this because we included the keywords in both title tags after re-write and tweak.
We added a blog as a sub-domain earlier in March of this year. When the serp's changed we directed our keyword targeting efforts towards the new results. Link count is no more than five. Link building started after the serp change.
Since your question I have taken a deeper look into our site's link structure. And started with adding canonical/nofollow tags. Our page authority went from 1 to 27 fyi (top-level categories).
Is there a possibility the big "g" would again, swap our serp once more, back to the original homepage link for these keywords? Ideally for conversion purposes we would work with our current results. Thanks again for the right question. Your input is welcomed.
-
Hi Brian,
Did the PPC landing page gain any links? Were there any other changes made to the structure of the site?
Rand did a post about a year ago regarding several reasons why you may have the wrong page in the results. Do any of those reasons seem to fit?
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions
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
-
Blacklisted website no longer blacklisted, but will not appear on Google's search engine.
We have a client who before us, had a website that was blacklisted by Google. After we created their new website, we submitted an appeal through Google's Webmaster Tools, and it was approved. One year later, they are still unable to rank for anything on Google. The keyword we are attempting to rank for on their home page is "Day in the Life Legal Videos" which shouldn't be too difficult to rank for after a year. But their website cannot be found. What else can we do to repair this previously blacklisted website after we're already been approved by Google? After doing a link audit, we found only one link with a spam score of 7, but I highly doubt that is what is causing this website to no longer appear on Google. Here is the website in question: https://www.verdictvideos.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rodneywarner0 -
What sort of content for 'non-niche' website?
Hey guys, had a question with regards to content production. We run an store called Yellow Octopus in Australia and we've literally got thousands of products (4500 skus last count). We've got everything from novelty mugs to kitchen accessories to gag gifts, t-shirts and tech gadgets. I've read a lot of material on creating awesome content to attract backlinks and we are ready to craft our content strategy. We've got a team in place - graphic designer, illustrator and writers to execute that strategy. It's just a matter of formulating the strategy! Largely speaking I have an idea of the quality of content required because I look at a lot of it. The real issue is what type of content is right for us? Most of the articles I have read focus on niche industries i.e. SEO, Piano sales or health foods. Right off the bat I can come up with hundreds of content pieces that work around those niches. However, with such a diverse range of products I'm unsure of what our niche really is, in fact not having a niche is almost our niche. Of course we could do gift guides like '30 Unbelievable Gifts for Foodies' (and we do, do those). However they aren't really the type of posts that are likely to attract back-links. Is the best strategy to split the content into categories? What sort of content pieces would you suggest for a company such as ours? Many thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheGreatestGoat0 -
Dfferent url of some other site is shown by Google in cace copy of our site's page
Hi, When i check cached copy of url of my site http://goo.gl/BZw2Zz , the url in cache copy shown by Google is of some other third party site. Why is Google showing third party url in our site's cached url. Did any of you guys faced any such issue. Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?
If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage? Nothing? Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
Weird Page switch for a keyword in Google Rankings
Over this past weekend Google switched the page which usually showed in search results for keyword benchmarking. It went from from http://www.apqc.org/benchmarking to http://www.apqc.org/benchmarking-portal/osb. Also on Google the Rankings for the keyword 'benchmarking' sank from 15 to 47 for http://www.apqc.org/benchmarking Just looking for some theories or ideas or anyone that has had this happen to them.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseninja0 -
Google is ranking the wrong page for the targeted keyword
I have two examples below where we want it to rank for the targeted page but google picked another page to rank instead. This is happening a lot on this site I just recently started to work on. Example 1 Googles Choice for key word Motorcycle Tires: http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/cl/50/Tires-and-Wheels What we want Google to choice for Motorcycle Tires: http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/49/-/181/Motorcycle-Tires Other pages about Motorcycle tires: http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/d/12/Motorcycle-Tires We even used the rel="canonical" for this url to point to our target page. http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/50/-/181/Motorcycle-Tires Example 2 ATV Tires We want this page to rank http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/81/165/ATV-Tires however google has decided to rank http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/43/81/165/723/ATV-Tires-All that is acutally one folder under where we want it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoRM0 -
Why does google not show my ecommerce category page when I have the same keywords for many products in the product title?
I have found that google removes the google serach listing of a category from my site (ecommerce) when products within the category have the same key words. I sell golf shirts and have a category called "Mens Golf Shirts" Within the category I have added many products but when the too many of the products say mens golf shirt my link on google gets removed. Before i had products named: FUNKTION Mens Short Sleeve Golf Shirt Red / Black but now I have had to change it to: FUNKTION Red / Black I can understand that they may see this a keyword stuffing but how do I get around this to ensure that each product can rank on google for mens golf shirt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | funktiongolf0 -
Why do branded manufacturer websites have multiple pages for their products?
My favorite golf ball is the Srixon Tour Yellow ball. Srixon has a product detail page here (www.srixon.com) AND there's also a product detail page here at shop.srixon.com. Is there any sort of SEO penalty here because there's some duplication? Does the fact the store is a separate subdomain make this more allowable? Many branded manufacturer websites work this way but it just doesn't make sense to me to have two product pages that you have to manage content when you can have just 1 with a call to action. I also work for a branded manufacturer and am considering rebuilding our website from the ground up with the online store and the main/marketing website blended into one to eliminate this duplication. We have this same duplicated marketing/store setup as well. any feedback is greatly appreciated. Confused.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Timmmmy0