Non-optimised pages ranking higher than optimised homepage
-
I'm a developer working with a dating site and we're having what appear to be unusual ranking behaviour for the keyword "Ukraine Brides".
When searching for "Ukraine Brides" we typically have the top 3 results in Google, however the homepage is almost never ranked #1. Other non-optimised pages appear ahead of it. I believe this is having a negative affect on our conversion rate, so wish to see this resolved.
For instance, if you search here in NZ, the results are typically:
- Login page (/account/login)
- Search page (/search)
- Home page (/)
Similar situation when searching in the US, but typically the top result is the search page.
Is this unusual? We've spent quite a bit of time optimising the homepage, it has more external links, more internal links, better content that targets the keyword, more traffic, etc. Even so, the login and search pages appear higher.
A side note, the average CTR for "Ukraine Brides" is significantly lower than "Ukraine Brides Agency" (20% vs 80% respectively), so I don't think that it's purely a 'brand keyword'.
A few thoughts were:
- The search page is not accessible from the homepage unless you are logged in. Maybe this is causing some sort of linking/seo/ranking issue?
- Re: the login page being higher, perhaps many existing users visit the login page directly from this keyword in order to login straight away so Google pushes this to the top. I think this is less likely because most existing users will be logged in automatically (via cookies "remember me") and the homepage has a login form in anycase
- The site supports multiple languages. Maybe this is causing some canonical issues?
- There was an additional suggestion that we should noindex the login and search pages in order to resolve this ranking issue, but were nervous that we'd lose a large amount of organic clicks if we did this. Google must be doing this for a reason, so we wanted to resolve that underlying reason before dropping the noindex hammer.
The fear is of course that we've done something wrong with our homepage which is causing it to perform poorly and thus these other pages rank higher. The hope would be that if we fixed that, that our rank for other keywords would improve also.
It would be great if we could get some more eyes on this to hopefully confirm we're not doing anything silly, and are just generally after a second opinion.
-
I've attached some data for the bounce rate and time spent. I segmented by New users, as existing users I'm sure would skew the stats.
The Search page wins out on both. As for the freshness of content, the search page wins again, just by the nature of the content, with new members signing up frequently. I don't really trust GA's page speed metrics; from my tests the too appear comparable with a slight edge again towards the Search page.
I suppose if users are visiting the homepage and then realise they cannot get to the homepage, it could contribute to the bounce rate (and then they may click on the Search result listing). Alternatively though, if Google see users typically going to the Search page immediately, is it more likely to rank that higher to cater to that experience?
-
Wow, yeah, this is weird! For what it's worth, your hreflang tags seem fine, so I'd be surprised if there are canonical issues. And Google has indexed your home page.
Here's what I'd dig into: does Google think visitors want to land on your /search/ page before your homepage? I work on a site that uses a search page as a paid and organic search landing page, and it has the best conversion rate of any page on our site. Is it possible that Google thinks your homepage offers a bad user experience, and your /search/ page offers a better one, so it's picking what it thinks is best?
To see if that could be the case, I'd look into:
- What's the bounce rate of the home vs /search/ page?
- What's the time spent on page (if you can measure that properly) of each?
- How long do the pages take to load?
- How fresh is the content on the homepage vs search? (I assume the account page is the most boring.)
If this is the case, you may want to consider letting visitors search, then requiring a registration.
Good luck! And let us know what you find out!
Kristina
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
-
Ecommerce category pages & improving rankings
Hi Moz 🙂 I work on an ecommerce site & am getting stuck with how to improve rankings on category pages. I have a competitor who writes loads of content for their category pages under tabs & they perform very well. The content isn't particularly helpful, more about their range and what they offer. I have tested adding similar content under a tab to some of our category pages - with some performing well & others not as well. I know this isn't ideal, and I'd like some help with an alternative. Does anyone have tips on improving rankings on category pages? I don't have much control on the layout, this is controlled by our parent company which restricts us. I am researching writing user guides, but these will be on other pages not directly on the category page & the way we have to add them is a lot of manual work for our webmaster, so I can't get them up as quickly as I'd like. I have seen REI have a small bit of content at the top of their pages that link to guides e.g - https://www.rei.com/c/static-and-rescue-ropes But obviously their domain authority is so high already, that they don't need as much help as me 🙂 At the moment I have some new Chair pages I need to rank, these are competitive and any ideas would be great 🙂 Here are some examples: http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/ergonomic-office-chairs http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/executive-office-chairs Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
How does this company rank this page?
If you Google the keyword "used iPhone 5," the URL ranking #1 in the SERP is the following: http://buy.gazelle.com/buy-used-iphone-5/ This page has zero content on it and a button on it that takes you to a category page with the iPhone 5 pre selected. My question is **how does this page outrank the sites products pages? **I ran a backlink analysis and don't see any links pointing to that URL. Also, **how does this site deal with its duplicate content issues? **If you look at the following URLs, you'll see a bunch of duplicate content in the "Key Features" section below the fold. http://buy.gazelle.com/buy/used/iphone-5-16gb-at-t http://buy.gazelle.com/buy/used/iphone-5-16gb-sprint If you think about it, this site will have different product pages for each variations of cellphone carrier and cellphone storage capacity. So for an iPhone 5, they will have 15 pages! Any insight into this would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cody_West0 -
Silo not ranking for main silo page - what can I do?
Hi everyone, I set up a silo for my page http://werkzeug-kasten.com/ . Unfortunately only the silos inner pages rank very good. These are for example http://werkzeug-kasten.com/suchmaschinenoptimierung-seo-freiburg/keyword-analyse/ for "Keywordanalyse SEO Freiburg" <a>http://werkzeug-kasten.com/suchmaschinenoptimierung-seo-freiburg/onpage-seo/</a> for "Onpage SEO Freiburg" ... but the silos main page <a>http://werkzeug-kasten.com/suchmaschinenoptimierung-seo-freiburg/</a> does not rank for "SEO Freiburg". Do you have any idea why that might be? Cheers, Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Best tips for getting a video page to rank?
We have a video for our company, located here: http://www.imageworkscreative.com/imageworks-creative-video It's an overview of our company and the services we offer. We'd like to get this page ranking, but we haven't had much luck so far. Our Youtube account does better, but I'm looking for some things we can do on or offsite to get this page to rank. Any tips would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottImageWorks0 -
Keywords going to Subdomain instead of targeted page(general landing page)
Why are some of my keywords going to subdomains instead of the more general/targeted landing page. For example, on my ecommerce website, the keyword 'tempurpedic' is directing to the subdomain URL of a specific tempurpedic product page instead of the general landing page. The product has a page authority of 15 and the Tempurpedic landing pages with all the products has an authority of 31. I have also noticed that my 'furniture stores in houston' keyword directs to my "occasional tables" URL! instead of a the much more targeted homepage. Is there something I am missing here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nat88han0 -
Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?
If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage? Nothing? Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
Wrong page getting ranked
Hi all, we have product category pages on our ecommerce web site and we also produce blog content (such as buyers guides, setup guides etc) to help with ranking and give our site some good quality, unique content. However we are sometimes finding that the buyers guide / blog content gets ranked by Google over our product category page. I'm hoping, if I give an example or two, some one smart out there may be able to point me in the right direction as to how we can avoid this and get the product category page ranked instead? You will see from my examples we are linking internally using the keywords from the buyers guides to the product category pages in order to show the most important page to Google for these keywords and are trying to structure the product category pages as well as possible to make it the most optimized page for the term. Example: Keyword "twin dvd player"... product category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/twin-dvd-player/ ... blog page actually getting ranked for this keyword: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/advice-center/dual-screen-and-twin-dvd-player-explained/ Keyword "site radio".... product category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/audio/radio/site-radio/ .... blog buyer guide page actually getting ranked for keyword: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/advice-center/Site-radio-buying-guide/ Any help / pointers appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasef0 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0