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
-
Password Protected Page(s) Indexed
Hi, I am wondering if my website can get a penalty if some password protected pages are showing up when I search on google: site:www.example.com/sub-group/pass-word-protected-page That shows that my password protected page was indexed either before or after adding the password protection. I've seen people suggest no indexing the page. Is that the best method to take care of this? What if we are planning on pushing the page live later on? All of these pages have no title tag, meta description, image alt text, etc. Should I add them for each page? I am wondering what is the best step, especially if we are planning on pushing the page(s) live. Thanks for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aua0 -
Best way to link to 1000 city landing pages from index page in a way that google follows/crawls these links (without building country pages)?
Currently we have direct links to the top 100 country and city landing pages on our index page of the root domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
I would like to add in the index page for each country a link "more cities" which then loads dynamically (without reloading the page and without redirecting to another page) a list with links to all cities in this country.
I do not want to dillute "link juice" to my top 100 country and city landing pages on the index page.
I would still like google to be able to crawl and follow these links to cities that I load dynamically later. In this particular case typical site hiearchy of country pages with links to all cities is not an option. Any recommendations on how best to implement?0 -
How can I optimize pages in an index stack
I have created an index stack. My home page is http://www.southernwhitewater.com My home page (if your look at it through moz bat for chrome bar} incorporates all the pages in the index. Is this Bad? I would prefer to index each page separately. As per my site index in the footer What is the best way to optimize all these pages individually and still have the customers arrive at the top and links directed to the home page ( which is actually the 1st page). I feel I am going to need a rel=coniacal might be needed somewhere. Any help would be great!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VelocityWebsites0 -
Language Subdirectory homepage not indexed by Google
Hi mozzers, Our Spanish homepage doesn't seem to be indexed or cached in Google, despite being online for over a month or two. All Spanish subpages are indexed and have started to rank but not the homepage. I have submitted sitemap xml to GWTools and have checked there's no noindex on the page - it seems to be in order. And when I run site: command in Google it shows all pages except homepage. What could be the problem? Here's the page: http://www.bosphorusyacht.com/es/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0 -
Urgent Site Migration Help: 301 redirect from legacy to new if legacy pages are NOT indexed but have links and domain/page authority of 50+?
Sorry for the long title, but that's the whole question. Notes: New site is on same domain but URLs will change because URL structure was horrible Old site has awful SEO. Like real bad. Canonical tags point to dev. subdomain (which is still accessible and has robots.txt, so the end result is old site IS NOT INDEXED by Google) Old site has links and domain/page authority north of 50. I suspect some shady links but there have to be good links as well My guess is that since that are likely incoming links that are legitimate, I should still attempt to use 301s to the versions of the pages on the new site (note: the content on the new site will be different, but in general it'll be about the same thing as the old page, just much improved and more relevant). So yeah, I guess that's it. Even thought the old site's pages are not indexed, if the new site is set up properly, the 301s won't pass along the 'non-indexed' status, correct? Thanks in advance for any quick answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDMcNamara0 -
Will Google read my page title and H1?
Dim strTitle : strTitle = "The Title Of My Page" <title>Company name - <%=strTitle%></title> <%=strTitle%> Will Google be able to read this? When I view source the relevant information is in the tags but I'm wondering if Google hates this or not? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hughescov0 -
Google Not Indexing Description or correct title (very technical)
Hey guys, I am managing the site: http://www.theattractionforums.com/ If you search the keyword "PUA Forums", it will be in the top 10 results, however the title of the forum will be "PUA Forums" rather than using the code in the title tag, and no description will display at all (despite there being one in the code). Any page other than the home-page that ranks shows the correct title and description. We're completely baffled! Here are some interesting bits and pieces: It shows up fine on Bing If I go into GWT and Fetch as Google Bot, it shows up as "Unreachable" when I try to pull the home-page. We previously found that it was pulling 'index.htm' before 'index.php' - and this was pulling a blank page. I've fixed this in the .htaccess however to make it redirect, however this hasn't solved the problem. I've disallowed it from pulling the description .etc from the Open Directory with the use of meta tags - didn't change anything. It's vBulletin and is running vBSEO Any suggestions at all guys? I'll be forever in anyones debt who can solve this, it's proving to be near impossible to fix. Here is the .htaccess file, it may be a part of the issue: RewriteEngine On DirectoryIndex index.php index.html Redirect /index.html http://www.theattractionforums.com/index.php RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.theattractionforums.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trx
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.theattractionforums.com/$1 [L,R=301] RewriteRule ^((urllist|sitemap_).*.(xml|txt)(.gz)?)$ vbseo_sitemap/vbseo_getsitemap.php?sitemap=$1 [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(admincp/|modcp/|cron|vbseo_sitemap/)
RewriteRule ^((archive/)?(..php(/.)?)?)$ vbseo.php [L,QSA] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^(admincp|modcp|clientscript|cpstyles|images)/
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ vbseo.php [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^forum/(.*)$ http://www.theattractionforums.com/$1 [R=301,L]0 -
Do in page links pointing to the parent page make the page more relevant for that term?
Here's a technical question. Suppose I have a page relevant to the term "Mobile Phones". I have a piece of text, on that page talking about "mobile phones", and within that text is the term "cell phones". Now if I link the text "cell phones", to the page it is already placed on (ie the parent page) - will the page gain more relevancy for the term "cell phones"?? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770