Wrong page showing in SERPs

Hi guys,

this one really puzzles me.

I created a WP site that has a static home page e.g. www.mykeyword.com isn't a news feed, but a normal page that is optimized for "My keyword" (and the domain is mykeyword.com). I moved the news feed to mykeyword.com/news, because I sporadically want to add some new content in order to keep the site live, but so far the news feed has only one article that isn't optimized at all.

When I search Google for "my keyword" I can see my site on 5th page (yeah, not the best results but the site is only few days old and I haven't done any LB yet) but the page showing in SERPs "mykeyword.com/news" and not the homepage even though homepage is more optimized, has more text etc etc.

Should I only give it more time or is there some WP tweaking to be done in order for G to recognise the homepage?

Awesome - Bing shows my site (homepage) on 3th SERP page with all the correct metas, yet on Google my site jumps through 5th to 8th SERP page, each day showing different subpage (some of them have less than 200 words of text and are totally irrelevant to the main KW I'm searching for) with totally broken/false/"wtf is this??" metas.

I love G so much...

Your homepage seem to be overoptimized for your keyword. Your homepage may banned to rank for that particular keyword until you fix your home page.
Try to lower keyword density.

May just be a bounce. Update us please.

The right page appeared in SERPs for a half day, then it got bouncing again showing totally irrelevant pages like mykeyword.com/contact, mykeyword.com/subpage/subpage and now it disappeared for good.

The Good thing is I discovered what's wrong - this WP theme I am currently using is putting the site title in H1 (I am not familiar with this theme and I thought the site title will be shown through some "title" div element or something...)

So Google got totally confused, because EVERY single page (circa 40 pages) was named/h1-ed/titled "My Keyword". So I rewrote the code and now only one page has H1 tag "My keyword", other pages have their specific H1s...


But I wonder - why was and still is Bing totally cool with displaying my site correctly, even pushing it up each day? Is it because it's technologically inferior to Google and simply cant handle such little details or is it more "chillaxed" about the whole SEO deal?

Do you use canonicals to lead Google the correct lander? Could be an option.

I have a site that is the opposite. The homepage is ranking for the three main keywords I want to rank the inner pages for. The site has over 10k pages, but the three main keywords are where the big money is. Thing is, the homepage has a CTA which is the same across the whole site, but each page has unique content (so canonicals won't work here). The inner pages aren't over optimised either...Can't figure it out. By now, from past SEO conquests, I should be ranking in the top 10. In Bing, I'm top 5 for all three keywords, so you know that Google is being a dick about something.

Also in this case you can use canonicals. A canonical shows google which site should rank instead of the site with the tag on. Nothing more, nothing less.

RedMango said:

I have a site that is the opposite. The homepage is ranking for the three main keywords I want to rank the inner pages for. The site has over 10k pages, but the three main keywords are where the big money is. Thing is, the homepage has a CTA which is the same across the whole site, but each page has unique content (so canonicals won't work here). The inner pages aren't over optimised either...Can't figure it out. By now, from past SEO conquests, I should be ranking in the top 10. In Bing, I'm top 5 for all three keywords, so you know that Google is being a dick about something.

Click to expand...

I have this issue on a few e-commerce sites that are themed around a certain genre.

Despite creating specific landing pages, G just ranks the homepage first, despite being poorly optimized (in comparison).

Just a trend in ranking pages that link to everywhere you would need on the topic, rather than ranking sub pages for specific KW's.

This is why large sites such as Ebay and Amazon rank for all sub niches of a topic, because they contain every possible sub category under the sun.

Same as wikipedia etc, they contain every possible detail on the topic, and therefore rank for every single related KW.

Also appears in local search, if you only optimise for one side of the topic + Location, you will be outranked by someone who has both topics + location, even if from a customer perspective including the 2nd topic is void, in G's eyes, including it shows you cover the whole topic and not just a sub section.

FPS

FutureProofSeo said:

I have this issue on a few e-commerce sites that are themed around a certain genre.

Despite creating specific landing pages, G just ranks the homepage first, despite being poorly optimized (in comparison).

Just a trend in ranking pages that link to everywhere you would need on the topic, rather than ranking sub pages for specific KW's.

This is why large sites such as Ebay and Amazon rank for all sub niches of a topic, because they contain every possible sub category under the sun.

Same as wikipedia etc, they contain every possible detail on the topic, and therefore rank for every single related KW.

Also appears in local search, if you only optimise for one side of the topic + Location, you will be outranked by someone who has both topics + location, even if from a customer perspective including the 2nd topic is void, in G's eyes, including it shows you cover the whole topic and not just a sub section.

FPS

Click to expand...

Thanks FPS, to give a little more detail, the homepage isn't optimised at all (as you mentioned) for any of the three kws. It does have a dropdown box for all of the top pages in the site, including the top three that I want, but it doesn't make any sense. I'm tempted to put direct links on the homepage to these three inner pages to see if it will pass link juice through to the optimised inner pages.

Also, the keywords are like this: keyword + destination/country the homepage is just mentions 'keyword' and has a dropdown box of all countries. The whole idea is to not have traffic going to the homepage....I'm totally stumped.

Yeah I've tried exact match in the nav bar, and exact match in the HP content combined with some lsi's as other tests.

Not sure if there was a recent update related to this, but roughly a week ago my sub-page was outranking the HP for the main KW, however now it has been completely replaced in the SERP's.

TBH most links are pointing at the homepage, most "association signals", ie Brand mentioned along with the KW and link are to the HP. So there are a lot of signals that point to the homepage.

Maybe it's a sign that certain things are more influential than others. Maybe brand + KW + link to page in one sentence, contained in an article related to the subject is the way forward for future link building.

Most social signals also point to the HP.

Will do further tests and see.

FPS