My landing page changed in google's serp. I used to have a product page now I have a pdf?
-
I have been optimizing this page for a few weeks now and and have seen our page for up from 23rd to 11th on the serp's. I come to work today and not only have I dropped to 15 but I've also had my relevant product page replaced by this page . Not to mention the second page is a pdf! I am not sure what happened here but any advice on how I could fix this would be great. My site is www.mynaturalmarket.com and the keyword I'm working on is Zyflamend.
-
We had a caching error and I think google pulled whatever it could. The webmaster fixed the error and we rebounded (mostly) in the serp's. Oddly we regained our spot for a different product (almost same name different version) but it's actually more relevant and converts better. so it all worked out in the end.
-
I'm glad that helped you, see you on top of the rankings
-
I don't know how I didn't think of nofollow, I generally try to avoid using them but this case is clearcut! Thanks that will be great.
-
hey Ken, yes I've used an advanced search but couldn't find any category for that product, just because that was in fact a product as you specified now) you can still maintain your pdf linked, what I recommend you is to be sure that the pdf won't cannibalize the kw for your page to rank, this by:
- modifying the title as be more descriptive
- using a link like more info on the product to link the pdf (no zyflamend kw on the anchor)
- maybe nofollowing the link to the pdf if you're goal is to not rank with the pdf
-
Are you using a personalized search because my unpersonalized shows it about 14 as does rank checker. Zyflamend is a product, but it's a product that falls under it's brand or condition specific. I removed the pdf link from the product page I'm hoping that will help.
-
I have been doing not any black hat or aggressive optimizations and I don't have any unnatural anchor text. The weird thing is that the only place that the pdf appears on my site is on the original page that isn't on the serps anymore. I also still rank 5th for zyflamend pm, Thats why I'm so confused.
-
Hi Ken, actually I still see the html page ranking over tghe pdf one however they're way down in the serps like position 51 and 52!
I think you should organize the categories pages vs the product ones and then try to use all the related content to boost your results. i don't know what zyflamend is but if it's a cateogry of products the ranking page should be a list page (like this one http://www.mynaturalmarket.com/Herbs-Botanicals.html) if it's a product then a product page. You should reflect that structure in your website, trying to avoid cannibalization through pages, for example avoid inserting category related keywords in your product page or they can cannibalize your list page. In that same way try to not optimize support material as pdfs are to cannibalize product page keywords. you both have zyflamend in the beginning of the title. You can try to cahnge the pdf titel as: additional information on zyflamend - research and bla bla bla... try to be descriptive since you don't want that page to rank.
Hope this may help youy!!
-
What kind of optimizing have you been doing? It could be possible that you over-optimized your anchor text for the keyword, causing your landing page to fall out of the SERPs, and Google is displaying the next relevant page on your site, which happens to be a PDF.
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
-
Can you create town focused landing pages for a website without breaking Google guidelines?
I recently watched a webmaster video that said that town focused landing pages are seen as doorway pages if they only exist to capture search traffic. And then I read that just because you can sell your product/service in a certain area, doesn't mean you can have a page for it on your website. Is it possible to create town focused landing pages for a website without breaking Google guidelines?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream1 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
What was your experience with changing site url's?
I work with a company that is about to move to a new platform. Because the category and page structure is different every almost every url but the home page will need to be 301 redirected. I know how to do this and am pretty sure I will find and fix 99% ahead of time and not have too many 404's showing up in webmaster tools to clean up. My question is has anyone who is reading this post had to do this before and what was your experience with organic traffic after you made the switch. I am predicting that even if I successfully redirected 100% of the url's there would be some loss for a couple of months just due to the fact that we are making a major change. My bosses are asking if there will be any loss and I need to tell them what to expect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KentH0 -
301'd an important, ranking page to the wrong new page, any recourse?
Our 1,300 page site conversion from static html to Wordpress platform went flawlessly with the exception of 1 significant issue....an old, important, highly ranking page was 301 redirected to the wrong corresponding new page. The page it was redirected to is about a similar product, but not the same. This was an oversight that slipped through. It was brought to my attention when I noticed this new page was still holding the old page's rankings but the bounce rate skyrocketed (clearly because the content on the wrong new page was not relevant). Once identified, we cleaned up the redirect. My fear is that all the juice built up on the old .html page that ranked well has now permanently been passed to an irrelevant, insignificant page. -Is there any way to clean up this mistake? -Is there anything I can do to assist Google in associating the correct 'new' page with correct 'old' page after the wrong redirect was initially set-up? -Am I going to have to start from scratch with the new page in terms of trust, backlinks, etc. since google already noted the redirect? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen0 -
Google is indexing the wrong page
Hello, I have a site I am optimizing and I cant seem to get a particular listing onto the first page due to the fact google is indexing the wrong page. I have the following scenario. I have a client with multiple locations. To target the locations I set them up with URLs like this /<cityname>-wedding-planner.</cityname> The home page / is optimized for their port saint lucie location. the page /palm-city-wedding-planner is optimized for the palm city location. the page /stuart-wedding-planner is optimized for the stuart location. Google picks up the first two and indexes them properly, BUT the stuart location page doesnt get picked up at all, instead google lists / which is not optimized at all for stuart. How do I "let google know" to index the stuart landing page for the "stuart wedding planner" term? MOZ also shows the / page as being indexed for the stuart wedding planner term as well but I assume this is just a result of what its finding when it performs its searches.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mediagiant0 -
Google is ranking the wrong page and I don't know why?
I have an E-Commerce store and to make things easy, let's say I am selling shoes. There is: Category named 'Shoes' and 3 products 'Sport shoes', 'Hiking shoes' and 'Dancing shoes' My problem: For the keyword 'Shoes' Google is showing the product result 'Sport shoes'. This makes no sense from user perspective. (It's like searching for 'iPhone' and getting a result for 'iPhone 4s' instead of a general overview.) Now what are the specifics of my category page (Which I want Google to rank): It has more external links with higher quality It has more internal links It has much higher page authority It has useful text to guide the user for the keyword It is a category instead of a product All this given, I just don't know how I can signal Google that this page makes sense to show in SERPs? Hope you can help with this!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal0 -
No matter what I do, my website isn't showing up in search results. What's happening?
I've checked for meta-robots, all SEO tags are fixed, reindexed with google-- basically everything and it's not showing up. According to SEOMoz all looks fine, I am making a few fixes, but nothing terribly major. It's a new website, and i know it takes a while, but there is no movement here in a month. Any insights here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wabash0 -
Restructuring Menu's
Hi all I am running my site on Wordpress using a slightly modified them from Studiopress on the Genisis frame work. I am extremely over my head but alas until I get some revenue SEO and Design are all on me. I do not know HTML or CSS but I do follow directions well (unless you ask my wife). Disclaimer out of the way I have some questions. I would like to change up my menu's to be more on the line of Products | Services | About Us | Contact Us | Blog Listing various direct mail pieces under Products, Sevices and so on and so forth. I wonder does this mean I will have to figure out how to write 301's and other complicated things or can I just make the changes. I think but might be wrong that this will change the URL's. Any advice before I mess this up would be greatly helpful. My site is http://www.roiautosolutions.com. If you want a few laughs about the car business read the 2 most recent blog post, anything before that and my writing style is pretty boring. Thanks, Mark Hilger
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhilger0