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://mza.bundledseo.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
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
-
Big discrepancies between pages in Google's index and pages in sitemap
Hi, I'm noticing a huge difference in the number of pages in Googles index (using 'site:' search) versus the number of pages indexed by Google in Webmaster tools. (ie 20,600 in 'site:' search vs 5,100 submitted via the dynamic sitemap.) Anyone know possible causes for this and how i can fix? It's an ecommerce site but i can't see any issues with duplicate content - they employ a very good canonical tag strategy. Could it be that Google has decided to ignore the canonical tag? Any help appreciated, Karen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Internal Search Results Appear in Google SERPS
My friend is running an ecommerce store selling apparels. How can we make internal search results to appear in Google SERPS and rank them? For example: the query is "peplum dress". You type the query into the internal search box and it returns a set of results. In this case, it's product listing. How can we optimize and rank it so it appears in Google SERP? Do we do it the traditional way in terms of links? Say URL is: http://www.asos.com/search/peplum-top?q=peplum+top&r=2 And we build links to it? Some of you may ask why not create a dedicated page for this, the reason being we'd have too many categories if we were to create one for each. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WayneRooney0 -
Something unintelligible in google search results.
In the last month i see something that i can't explain, from nowhere the first search result for the keyword Name Necklace is an Etsy shop, (I attach an image). I try to find out why google gives this online shop the first position and i have no idea why is that. Please, any suggestions? mnbAIrY.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm0 -
Google Custom Searches with site CSS
Anyone good with GCS. I want to add Google custom searches in my site but with my site CSS.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csfarnsworth
I need results from GCS but want to display with my website CSS. Website is in OSCommerce and php.0 -
Indexing a several millions pages new website
Hello everyone, I am currently working for a huge classified website who will be released in France in September 2013. The website will have up to 10 millions pages. I know the indexing of a website of such size should be done step by step and not in only one time to avoid a long sandbox risk and to have more control about it. Do you guys have any recommandations or good practices for such a task ? Maybe some personal experience you might have had ? The website will cover about 300 jobs : In all region (= 300 * 22 pages) In all departments (= 300 * 101 pages) In all cities (= 300 * 37 000 pages) Do you think it would be wiser to index couple of jobs by couple of jobs (for instance 10 jobs every week) or to index with levels of pages (for exemple, 1st step with jobs in region, 2nd step with jobs in departements, etc.) ? More generally speaking, how would you do in order to avoid penalties from Google and to index the whole site as fast as possible ? One more specification : we'll rely on a (big ?) press followup and on a linking job that still has to be determined yet. Thanks for your help ! Best Regards, Raphael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pureshore0 -
Whats the best way to remove search indexed pages on magento?
A new client ( aqmp.com.br/ )call me yestarday and she told me since they moved on magento they droped down more than US$ 20.000 in sales revenue ( monthly)... I´ve just checked the webmaster tool and I´ve just discovered the number of crawled pages went from 3.260 to 75.000 since magento started... magento is creating lots of pages with queries like search and filters. Example: http://aqmp.com.br/acessorios/lencos.html http://aqmp.com.br/acessorios/lencos.html?mode=grid http://aqmp.com.br/acessorios/lencos.html?dir=desc&order=name Add a instruction on robots.txt is the best way to remove unnecessary pages of the search engine?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoMartin10 -
Certain Pages Not Being Indexed - Please Help
We are having trouble getting a bulk of our pages indexed in google. Any help would be greatly appreciated! The Following Page types are being indexed through escaped fragment: http://www.cbuy.tv/#! http://www.cbuy.tv/celebrity#!65-Ashley-Tisdale/fashion/4097-Casadei-BLADE-PUMP/Product/175199 <cite>www.cbuy.tv/celebrity/155-Sophia-Bush#!</cite> However, all our pages that look like this, are not being indexed: http://www.cbuy.tv/#!Type=Photo&id=b1d18759-5e52-4a1c-9491-6fb3cb9d4b95&Katie-Holmes-Hot-Pink-Pants-Isabel-Marant-DAVID-DOUBLE-BREASTED-Wool-COAT-Maison-Pumps-Black-Bag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CBuy0 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0