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
-
Ranking issue for new website
Hi all, I have got a specific SEO challenge. 6 months ago, we started to build an eCommerce site (located in the UK). In order to speed up the site launch, we copied the entire site over from an existing site based in Ireland. Now, the new UK site has been running for 5 months. Google has indexed many pages, which is good, but we can't rank high (position: between 20-30 for most pages). We thought it was because of content duplication in spite of different regions. So we tried to optimize the pages for the UK site to make them more UK-related and avoid content duplication. I've also used schema to tell google it's a UK-based site and set up Google my business and got more local citations. Besides, If you could give me any suggestions, it'd be perfect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media
Thank you so much for your time and advice.1 -
Can I remove certain parameters from the canonical URL?
For example, https://www.jamestowndistributors.com/product/epoxy-and-adhesives?page=2&resultsPerPage=16 is the paginated URL of the category https://www.jamestowndistributors.com/product/epoxy-and-adhesives/. Can I remove the &resultsPerPage= variation from the canonical without it causing an issue? Even though the actual page URL has that parameter? I was thinking of using this: instead of: What is the best practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | laurengdicenso0 -
Can anyone tell me why this page has content wider than screen?
I am getting that error on my product pages. This link is in the errors http://www.wolfautomation.com/drive-accessory-safety-sto-module-i500 but when I look at it on mobile it is fine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
Strong Site, Pages, Ranking Low
Hey Mozers This is a question which has been bugging me for a while now I have an authority site in my niche which has a stronger DA than pretty well every competitor, but certain sections of the site underperform. For instance, when you search for 'Jerusalem Dead Sea tour', my item, http://www.touristisrael.com/tours/jerusalem-dead-sea-day-tour/ does not appear in the first few pages. I have a page that appears on the first page, but it is less relevant than this product page. This is an example, there are tens of cases like this. So the question is, am I signalling to Google not to rank these pages, and is there something I'm missing with regards to strengthening product pages in this tour section? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ben100010 -
Domain Authority: 23, Page Authority: 33, Can My Site Still Rank?
Greetings: Our New York City commercial real estate site is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. Key MOZ metric are as follows: Domain Authority: 23
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Page Authority: 33
28 Root Domains linking to the site
179 Total Links. In the last six months domain authority, page authority, domains linking to the site have declined. We have focused on removing duplicate content and low quality links which may have had a negative impact on the above metrics. Our ranking has dropped greatly in the last two months. Could it be due to the above metrics? These numbers seem pretty bad. How can I reverse without engaging in any black hat behavior that could work against me in the future? Ideas?
Thanks, Alan Rosinsky0 -
How to improve ranking of deep pages?
While this may sound like an obvious or stupid question at first...let me explain... We are an e-commerce website which sells one type of item nationally; for sake of an example which is similar to us, you can think of an e-commerce site that sells movie theater tickets in cities and towns across the country. Our home page ranks very well for the appropriate keywords as well as some of our state and city pages rank very well for local searches. However, while some state and city pages rank well for their respective local searches, others have a low page rank with some not even in the top 50 for their respective keywords. My question is that we aren't clear why some pages will rank well while others wont when the competition looks similar for those local searches. And in today's Panda/Penguin era we are unsure of how to get more of these state/city pages ranking better? For the record, we are quite strict about on-page SEO, 99% of our 5600 pages are crawled & we have minimum SEO errors from the SEOMoz crawls. Can anyone provide some feedback & thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTSupp0 -
Pages On Subfolder Not Ranking
A subdirectory/folder on our website doesn't seem to rank for any keywords where the same type of pages on the same competition level keywords rank perfectly fine. For awhile the pages weren't getting indexed but were crawled regularly. Can't seem to figure the problem out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bprimeelitellc0 -
Key page of site not ranking at all
Our site has the largest selection of dog clothes on the Internet. We're been (every so slowly) creeping up in the rankings for the "dog clothes" term, but for some reason only rank for our home page. Even though the home page (and every page on the domain) has links pointing to our specific Dog Clothes page, that page doesn't even rank anywhere when searching Google with "dog clothes site:baxterboo.com". http://www.google.com/webhp?source=hp&q=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=webhp&source=hp&q=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=f4efcaa1b8c328f Pages 2+ of product results from that page rank, but not the base page. It's not excluded in robots.txt, All on site links to that page use the same URL. That page is loaded with more text that includes the keywords. I don't believe there's duplicated content. What am I missing? Has the page somehow been penalized?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBPets0