New pages not ranking

[Marketing_Today]

I published some new landing pages about a month a go which are much better quality than previous pages and on an optimised URL. The old pages never ranked and the new pages aren't ranking either although they are much better.

The old pages 301 redirect to the new pages.

Any quick ways I can at least get them ranking? Not expecting Page 1 overnight but to at least see the new pages on Page 5 would be great!

[Eric_Rohrback]

The interesting part about your question is that the old pages never ranked, and the new pages aren't ranking either. Are you trying to rank for a keyword that's too difficult? Does your site have a manual or algorithmic penalty? Are other pages ranking on your site for different terms? You could have technical errors that are preventing the site from moving forward, or the keyword you're trying to rank for may be too difficult given the authority of your site vs the competition.

Can you share more details about this situation? Without knowing the site and the target it's pretty hard to give any real recommendation. Every site with relevant content to the target keyword phrase and tuned up onsite should at least hit page 5 as long as the keyword isn't overly competitive.

Would you be able to share more about this situation?

[antonioaraya]

Hey:

I would check this:

• Submit a sitemap.xml with the landing URLs and see if Google has indexed those pages (other way it's using the search operator "site:" in Google with the URL to check if it's indexed, e.g. site:domain.com/landing.html
• Check if other pages are ranking, if not, maybe your site has a problem (robots.txt blocking all the site, noindex tags on the section of your site, Google penalties that you can check in Google Search Console)
• If other pages are ranking, check if those pages may be duplicated from a SEO perspective. With "site:" check if other pages of your domain are ranking for the core keyword of one of your new landing pages, e.g. "site:domain.com dark chocolate".
• If there's other pages that appear first than your landing, you should decide what you will do with this. If your new landings are better, you should redirect the other ones to the new landing, or use "rel canonical" on both pages pointing to the new landing

Let me know if this works, if not, we can see other options.

[NgEF]

Hi!

Sounds like you did a great job optimizing the new pages! Perhaps what you can do is to check if the pages are indexed? If the new pages aren't indexed, then that might be the reason why they aren't ranking at all. If the previous pages ranked, but the new ones aren't even in the top 50, that suggests to me that the new pages aren't indexed.

The best way to do so is to simply access your Google Webmaster Tools account, then under the Google Index tab on the left, click on the Index Status tab and take a look there.

Here's a great guide to requesting a re-indexing of specific pages too: http://www.websitecouncil.com/get-website-url-indexed-google-minutes/

Hope it helps!