Google is indexing wrong page for search terms not on that page
-
I’m having a problem … the wrong page is indexing with Google, for search phrases “not on that page”.
Explained … On a website I developed, I have four products. For example sake, we’ll say these four products are:
- Sneakers (search phrase: sneakers)
- Boots (search phrase: boots)
- Sandals (search phrase: sandals)
- High heels (search phrase: high heels)
Error:
What is going “wrong” is … When the search phrase “high heels” is indexed by Google, my “Sneakers” page is being indexed instead (and ranking very well, like #2). The page that SHOULD be indexing, is the “High heels” page (not the sneakers page – this is the wrong search phrase, and it’s not even on that product page – not in URL, not in H1 tags, not in title, not in page text – nowhere, except for in the top navigation link).
Clue #1 … this same error is ALSO happening for my other search phrases, in exactly the same manner. i.e. … the search phrase “sandals” is ALSO resulting in my “Sneakers” page being indexed, by Google.
Clue #2 … this error is NOT happening with Bing (the proper pages are correctly indexing with the proper search phrases, in Bing).
Note 1: MOZ has given all my product pages an “A” ranking, for optimization.
Note 2: This is a WordPress website.
Note 3: I had recently migrated (3 months ago) most of this new website’s page content (but not the “Sneakers” page – this page is new) from an old, existing website (not mine), which had been indexing OK for these search phrases.
Note 4: 301 redirects were used, for all of the OLD website pages, to the new website.
I have tried everything I can think of to fix this, over a period of more than 30 days. Nothing has worked. I think the “clues” (it indexes properly in Bing) are useful, but I need help.
Thoughts?
-
The OP would like to keep the URLs and queries in confidence, but here is what I found upon investigation for those that might have the same issue in the future:
The main issue looks to be a recent URL change from [second most linked to URL on the domain] to the URL in question. There is a 301 redirect in place (as you mentioned), and the new URL is indexed, but it might be some time before it takes the place of the old URL. For the time being, Google for some reason thinks the other URL is the most relevant page, which is odd as there are more topical pages on the site, but I'm not a robot.
Good thing is that I feel a change coming. If you do a site: search for your domain with "term in question", Google is seeing the right URL as the most relevant page after the homepage. The homepage being first makes sense since it has the term on the page and it's the strongest page on your site.
A few things you might try in the mean time:
- Resumbit a sitemap of your old URLs that have 301 redirects.
- Resubmit a sitemap of the new URLs
- Get the three external links to the old page URL mentioned above changed to the new URL (three external links according to Moz Open Site Explorer)
- Your title tag and H1s are a little overstuffed with keywords right now. Try to dial that back a little and you only should have 1 H1 that is visible on the page. The H1 should be what people see as the title on the page right now rather than hidden in an extra header and in the body copy.
Try those items and give it a little more time.
-
Interesting. Can we have the domain, page URLs and phrases?
-
Have a read through the latest Whiteboard Friday from Rand - you might pick up some good pointers from that
https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday
-Andy
-
Also, just to be double sure that another instance of 'sneakers' is not showing up, try checking Google's text version of the cached page:
Search cache:www.website.com/HighPeelsPage, then look at the text version and verify that Google is not seeing sneakers anywhere other than the one nav instance. Once you have eliminated that possibility you can focus on others.Caro
-
Hi Michael,
Perhaps the internal link structure might be the cause of this.
If you have most of your pages linking (for instance with the menu in the sidebar) to the Sneakers-page. Google might think that page is the most important.
Also: new pages take a bit longer to start to rank well in the index. So it might be just a case of a matter of time before the new page starts to rank as you had intended.
Hope this helps?
Bas
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
-
Google Processing but Not Indexing XML Sitemap
Like it says above, Google is processing but not indexing our latest XML sitemap. I noticed this Monday afternoon - Indexed status was still Pending - and didn't think anything of it. But when it still said Pending on Tuesday, it seemed strange. I deleted and resubmitted our XML sitemap on Tuesday. It now shows that it was processed on Tuesday, but the Indexed status is still Pending. I've never seen this much of a lag, hence the concern. Our site IS indexed in Google - it shows up with a site:xxxx.com search with the same number of pages as it always has. The only thing I can see that triggered this is Sunday the site failed verification via Google, but we quickly fixed that and re-verified via WMT Monday morning. Anyone know what's going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
How to get google to categorize a website in search results?
Hello everyone and thanks in advance for your time. I have a good understanding about SEO, backlinks etc but nowhere near to professional! A good friend of mine has an online store made with opencart e commerce platform he would like to have have category view when his company name is searched on google. Does anyone has any idea how can this be achieved?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | superofelia0 -
PR Dilution and Number of Pages Indexed
Hi Mozzers, My client is really pushing for me to get thousands, if not millions of pages indexed through the use of long-tail keywords. I know that I can probably get quite a few of them into Google, but will this dilute the PR on my site? These pages would be worthwhile in that if anyone actually visits them, there is a solid chance they will convert to a lead do to the nature of the long-tail keywords. My suggestion is to run all the keywords for these thousands of pages through adwords to check the number of queries and only create pages for the ones which actually receive searches. What do you guys think? I know that the content needs to have value and can't be scraped/low-quality and pulling these pages out of my butt won't end well, but I need solid evidence to make a case either for or against it to my clients.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Whats the best way to remove search indexed pages on magento?
A new client ( aqmp.com.br/ )call me yestarday and she told me since they moved on magento they droped down more than US$ 20.000 in sales revenue ( monthly)... I´ve just checked the webmaster tool and I´ve just discovered the number of crawled pages went from 3.260 to 75.000 since magento started... magento is creating lots of pages with queries like search and filters. Example: http://aqmp.com.br/acessorios/lencos.html http://aqmp.com.br/acessorios/lencos.html?mode=grid http://aqmp.com.br/acessorios/lencos.html?dir=desc&order=name Add a instruction on robots.txt is the best way to remove unnecessary pages of the search engine?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoMartin10 -
Site Search Results in Index -- Help
Hi, I made a mistake on my site, long story short, I have a bunch of search results page in the Google index. (I made a navigation page full of common search terms, and made internal links to a respective search results page for each common search term.) Google crawled the site, saw the links and now those search results pages are indexed. I made versions of the indexed search results pages into proper category pages with good URLs and am ready to go live/ replace the pages and links. But, I am a little unsure how to do it /what the effects can be: Will there be duplicate content issues if I just replace the bad, search results links/URLs with the good, category page links/URLs on the navi. page? (is a short term risk worth it?) Should I get the search results pages de-indexed first and then relaunch the navi. page with the correct category URLs? Should I do a robots.txt disallow directive for search results? Should I use Google's URL removal tool to remove those indexed search results pages for a quick fix, or will this cause more harm than good? Time is not the biggest issue, I want to do it right, because those indexed search results pages do attract traffic and the navi. page has been great for usability. Any suggestions would be great. I have been reading a ton on this topic, but maybe someone can give me more specific advice. Thanks in advance, hopefully this all makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IOSC1 -
Drop in number of pages in Bing index
I regularly check our index inclusion and this morning saw that we had dropped from having approx 6,000 pages in Bing's index to less than 100. We still have 13,000 in Bing's image index, and I've seen no similar drop in the number of pages in either Google or Yahoo. I've checked with our dev team and there have been no significant changes to the sitemap or robots file. Has anybody seen anything like this before, or could give any insight into why it might be happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GBC0 -
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 -
Duplicate content on index.htm page
How do I avoid duplicate content on the index.htm page . I need to redirect the spider from the /index.htm file to the main root of http://www.manandhisvan.com.au and hence avoid duplicate content. Does anyone know of a foolproof way of achieving this without me buggering up the complete site Cheers Freddy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fatfreddy0