Taken a canonical off a page to let it rank with new unique content - what more can I do?
-
A week ago, I took a canonical off of a page that was pointing to the homepage for a very big, generic search term for my brand as we felt that it could have been harming our rankings (as it wasn't a true canonical page).
A week in and our rankings for the term have dropped 7 positions out of page 1 and the page we want to rank instead is nowhere to be seen. Do I hang fire? As such a big search term, it's affecting traffic, but I don't want to make any rash decisions.
Here's a bit more info:
For arguments sake, let's call the search term we're going after 'Boots', with the URL where the canonical was placed of /boots. The canonical went to the root domain as we sell, well... boots.
At the time, the homepage was ranking for Boots on page 1 and we wanted to change this so that the Boots page ranked for that term... all logical right?
We did the following:
- Took off mentions of Boots from meta on the homepage and made sure it was optimised for on the boots page.
- Took the canonical off of /boots.
- Used GSC to fetch & ask Google to recrawl "/boots".
- Resubmitted the sitemap.
Do I hang fire on running back to the safety of ranking for boots on the homepage? Do I risk keyword cannibalisation by adding the search terms back to the homepage?
-
Yes they should have put some groundwork in place before doing it! Especially of they knew it was such an important page.
Regards
Nigel
-
Thank you Nigel,
Really helpful advice. I definitely don't want to sit back and wait to fall off that cliff... I'm a bit miffed that our search agency suggested that we take the canonical off without making the changes you've just suggested first.
Thanks again,
Kelly
-
Hi Kelly
I work with eCommerce stores all the time and coincidentally some of those happen to be footwear sites. Anyway I'm sure it's just coincidence.
The problem you may have here could be multi-fold
1. Page Authority/Domain Authority - it may just be that because the home page has a high domain authority - (ie online reputation helped by back links from other high DA sites), that it was naturally easier to rank for contextually similar keywords to those that you were targeting for the home page.
The new page may have no backlinks whatsoever and therefore a low page authority (PA) so even though to you it appeared more relevant it may be really hard to rank quickly for the search terms Boots
2. Back links & Anchor text - The home page may well have back links through the anchor text Boots which may of course conflict with what you are trying to achieve for the new page, so it would not simply be enough to remove all mention of boots when other sites may be pointing at you through that keyword.
I don't think that simply waiting will make a lot of difference as Google updates dynamically now. But you may be able to influence how the page is treated internally by re-directing internal traffic through the keyword Boots.
Blog posts could be written citing the term Boots with back links to the new page.
Outside influencers may be able to write blog content or provide links back to you through the anchor text Boots.
Frankly if it's causing you problems internally by breaking this new page out and trying to rank for it I would always hold my hands up and re-canonicalise. You do not want to be accused of losing the company money. Keep the page there and maybe slide it across when more of the above has been achieved. Creating internal and getting backlinks for Boots will not make any difference as it's canonicalised to the home page. When you have waited a few months and can be more confident then maybe try again.
For sure you can't sit and wait as your credibility flies out of the window.
I have a client who sells a certain brand of sandals really well. His subcategories were tags so appended themselves to everything creating skinny content. We are just in the process of making them sub-categories. Frankly if Toe Post sandals fails to rank for the brand and is considered a subset or partial duplicate of sandals, then we will re-canonicalise pretty quickly back to sandals.
I hope that helps.
Sometime the logical way doesn't always achieve the best results.
Regards Nigel
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
-
Why some websites can rank the keywords they don't have in the page?
Hello guys, Yesterday, I used SEMrush to search for the keyword "branding agency" to see the SERP. The Liquidagency ranks 5th on the first page. So I went to their homepage but saw no exact keywords "branding agency", even in the page source. Also, I didn't see "branding agency" as a top anchor text in the external links to the page (from the report of SEMrush). I am an SEO newbie, can someone explain this to me, please? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Raymondlee0 -
Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page
Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Scraped content ranking above the original source content in Google.
I need insights on how “scraped” content (exact copy-pasted version) rank above the original content in Google. 4 original, in-depth articles published by my client (an online publisher) are republished by another company (which happens to be briefly mentioned in all four of those articles). We reckon the articles were re-published at least a day or two after the original articles were published (exact gap is not known). We find that all four of the “copied” articles rank at the top of Google search results whereas the original content i.e. my client website does not show up in the even in the top 50 or 60 results. We have looked at numerous factors such as Domain authority, Page authority, in-bound links to both the original source as well as the URLs of the copied pages, social metrics etc. All of the metrics, as shown by tools like Moz, are better for the source website than for the re-publisher. We have also compared results in different geographies to see if any geographical bias was affecting results, reason being our client’s website is hosted in the UK and the ‘re-publisher’ is from another country--- but we found the same results. We are also not aware of any manual actions taken against our client website (at least based on messages on Search Console). Any other factors that can explain this serious anomaly--- which seems to be a disincentive for somebody creating highly relevant original content. We recognize that our client has the option to submit a ‘Scraper Content’ form to Google--- but we are less keen to go down that route and more keen to understand why this problem could arise in the first place. Please suggest.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ontarget-media0 -
Possible to Improve Domain Authority By Improving Content on Low Page Rank Pages?
My sites domain authority is only 23. The home page has a page authority of 32. My site consists of about 400 pages. The topic of the site is commercial real estate (I am a real estate broker). A number of the sites we compete against have a domain authority of 30-40. Would our overall domain authority improved if we re-wrote the content for several hundred of pages that had the lowest page authority (say 12-15)? Is the overall domain authority derived by an average of the page authority of each page on a domain? Alternatively could we increase domain authority by setting the pages with the lowest page authority to "no index". By the way our domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Should we include a canonical or noindex on our m. (mobile) pages?
According to https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details, we should include a canonicalicalize back to our desktop version of the URL, but what if that desktop URL is noindexed? Should the m. version be noindexed as well? Or is it fine to leave it as a canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
How to Remove Joomla Canonical and Duplicate Page Content
I've attempted to follow advice from the Q&A section. Currently on the site www.cherrycreekspine.com, I've edited the .htaccess file to help with 301s - all pages redirect to www.cherrycreekspine.com. Secondly, I'd added the canonical statement in the header of the web pages. I have cut the Duplicate Page Content in half ... now I have a remaining 40 pages to fix up. This is my practice site to try and understand what SEOmoz can do for me. I've looked at some of your videos on Youtube ... I feel like I'm scrambling around to the Q&A and the internet to understand this product. I'm reading the beginners guide.... any other resources would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deskstudio0 -
How much (%) of the content of a page is considered too much duplication?
Google is not fond of duplication, I have been very kindly told. So how much would you suggest is too much?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonberenyi0 -
Pages with Little Content
I have a website that lists events in Dublin, Ireland. I want to provide a comprehensive number of listings but there are not enough hours in the day to provide a detailed (or even short) unique description for every event. At the moment I have some pages with little detail other than the event title and venue. Should I try and prevent Google from crawling/indexing these pages for fear of reducing the overall ranking of the site? At the moment I only link to these pages via the RSS feed. I could remove the pages entirely from my feed, but then that mean I remove information that might be useful to people following the events feed. Here is an example page with very little content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andywozhere0