Pages not being found in serp

[Socialdude]

Hi I'm helping a collegue with his website.

For what ever reason the pages in the Solutions Menu are not being found in the search result for keywords related to the pages. (Homepage mainly comes up in the search result).

Does anyone have any advise to why this may be happening?

*To give you a bit of a background understanding, previously all the menu content was copied (which I made him change), he also had hidden text on some pages (i made him remove, white text on white background) plus the url structure changed as well. Persoanlly I think he is over using , links, internal linking is not great & the general content is not great in the menu.

Your Thoughts are welcomed, thank you.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi

Is that a page where the homepage shows up instead of the desired page?  I didn't see anything from your domain on the first 1-20 results.

But see the screenshots.  That's a highly competitive term.  And then check out your client's domain's backlinks and facebook shares.  Very sparse. That clearly needs a lot of work.  Ryan's right, it does seem you've got your on page SEO down pretty good.  I'd take a look at your backlinking and social sharing metrics now, especially building links to those inner pages you want to rank for.

Maybe there's a better example where the homepage shows instead of the menu page?  That was the original question you had, yes?

-Dan

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[Socialdude]

cheers for your input, I have a suspicion there is a penalty because the site owner was participating in bad practices for quite some time & only when I did a bit of research work I relaised all this stuff was going.

Prob best to revamp the site, clear any improper seo and move forward, plus check to see if any penalties are in place with Google.

cheers...

[RyanKent]

The pages I checked from the Solutions menu are being indexed.

Jet Reports example, Dynamics Nav example

Clearly the site owner practiced black hat SEO which can directly lead to a manual or algorithmic penalty. My first suggestion is to review the site and ensure it has 100% been cleaned up on any actions which could cause a penalty.

Next, file a Reconsideration Request with Google. Be honest and explain you are a SEO who has recently cleaned up the site and want to ensure no penalties exist. If there is not any manual penalty applied to the site, you will gain peace of mind on this topic and can focus your energies elsewhere. If there is a manual penalty then work with Google to have the penalty lifted.

What's left is pure SEO for the site and these pages which are not performing well. This site needs SEO attention. One example, there is a page titled "Dynamics NAV". http://www.prostrategy-colman.ie/solutions/dynamics-nav

This page is clearly optimized for the term "Dynamics NAV". It's page title, header, URL and content all use the term. The page also contains perfect match anchor text "Dynamics NAV" linking to another page on the site. This link sends a strong, clear message to search engines traffic for the "Dynamics NAV" phrase should be sent to this other page. It's confusing and will negatively affect your rankings for the term.

[Socialdude]

cheers dude, this page here -> http://www.prostrategy-colman.ie/solutions/erp-business-management/microsoft-dynamics-nav-erp

looking to be found for Microsoft Dynamic Nav

[evolvingSEO]

Hi

Can you give an example of a page and the search you'd like it to show up for?

I am able to get "menu" pages to show as long as the query is specific enough and they all seem to be in the index.

-Dan