Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why does Google pick a low priority page on my site?
-
Hi Guys.
One of my pages ranks quite well for "mid year diaries 14-15" on Google. The problem is it's a really specific product page (A4, Hardback, day-to-a-page diary I think).
It would be much better for the user to land on our mid-year diaries category, not really deep into the site. Why is Google prioritizing this product page over our general 'mid year diaries' category?
Especially when the category would relate to the search more accurately?
I work for TOAD diaries and I think our page rank is 10 for this search.
Eagerly awaiting some insight

Thanks in advance everyone!
Isaac.
-
Hi Issac,
Keyword cannibalisation is pretty much exactly that. This is why it is important for pages to be as unique as possible.
The two below are sort of a similar thing, except the first one refers to linking to your key pages from a product page by way of a short sentence that has a link with some nice on-topic anchor text leading off.
- On your product pages, have a text link back to the key page that isn't the crumb-trail. You can also do this from other pages closer to the homepage
- Internal Links to your key pages
-Andy
-
Hi Andy! Thankyou sooooooo much! I'm kinda new to this. I worked for them for while as a product guy. I realised the SEO was lacking and so I've sorta stepped into that role.
Makes a lot of sense, I will defiantly be implementing some changes.
Not sure what you meant by links that aren't the 'crumb trail'. And also what did you mean by keyword cannibalisation? Is that just having more than one page that you try to optimise for the same keywords?
Again thankyou so much.
Isaac.
-
Hi Issac,
In these circumstances, there are a few things to look at.
- Internal Links to your key pages
- External links to key pages
- Add some unique content to these pages. There is no content currently on them http://www.toaddiaries.co.uk/shop/custom-diaries/mid-year-diaries-14-15
- On your product pages, have a text link back to the key page that isn't the crumb-trail. You can also do this from other pages closer to the homepage
- Make sure there is no keyword cannibalisation going on that could cause Google to choose one page over another
- There is no rel=canonical on any of the pages. Add these so that they self canonicalise
- Check to see if your key pages are indexed by Google. This often goes unnoticed and can have you chasing your tail
See how you get on with those. There are other lesser possibilities, but these should give you some good starting points.
-Andy
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
-
Landing page separate from product page
Hello there, I have a wordpress website with a woocommerce plugin. I have 4 landing pages that describe my products and at the end of the pages, I have a CTA to my product page. is it bad for SEO? my website: https://relationadviser.ir
On-Page Optimization | | Aaron.be1 -
Shifting target keyword to a new page, how do we rank the internal page?
I have been targeting one keyword for home page that was ranking between the postilion 6-7 but was never ranking on 1st as there were 2 highly competitive keywords targeted on the same page, I changed the keyword to an internal service page to rank it on 1st, I have optimized the content as well but the home page is still ranking on 11th, how do I get the internal page rank on that keyword
On-Page Optimization | | GOMO-Gabriel0 -
Word Count - Content site vs ecommerce site
Hi there, what are your thoughts on word count for a content site vs. an ecommerce site. A lot of content sites have no problem pushing out 500+ words per page, which for me is a decent amount to help you get traction. However on ecommerce sites, a lot of the time the product description only needs to be sub-100 words and the total word count on the page comes in at under 300 words, a lot of that could be considered duplicate. So what are your views? Do ecommerce sites still need to have a high word count on the product description page to rank better?
On-Page Optimization | | Bee1590 -
Should we rename and update a page or create a new page entirely?
Hi Moz Peoples! We have a small site with a simple site navigation, with only a few links on the nav bar. We have been doing some work to create a new page, which will eventually replace one of the links on the nav bar. The question we are having is, is it better to rename the existing page and replace its content and then wait for the great indexer to do its thing, or perm delete the page and replace it with the new page and content? Or is this a case where it really makes no difference as long as the redirects are set up correctly?
On-Page Optimization | | Parker8180 -
Google Console returning 0 pages as being indexed
HI there, I submitted my site notebuster.net to Search Console over a month ago and it is showing 0 pages as being indexed under the index status report. I know this isn't right as I can see that in google alone by typing in (site:notebusters.net) there are 113 pages indexed. Any idea why this might be? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | CosiCrawley0 -
Noindex child pages (whose content is included on parent pages)?
I'm sorry if there have been questions close to this before... I've using WordPress less like a blogging platform and more like a CMS for years now... For content management purposes we organize a lot of content around Parent/Child page (and custom-post-type) relationships; the Child pages are included as tabbed content on the Parent page. Should I be noindexing these child pages, since their content is already on the site, in full, on their Parent pages (ie. duplicate content)? Or does it not matter, since the crawlers may not go to all of the tabbed content? None of the pages have shown up in Moz's "High Priority Issues" as duplicate content but it still seems like I'm making the Parent pages suffer needlessly... Anything obvious I'm not taking into consideration? By the by, this is my first post here @ Moz, which I'm loving; this site and the forums are such a great resource! Anyways, thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | rsigg0 -
Will "internal 301s" have any effect on page rank or the way in which an SE see's our site interlinking?
We've been forced (for scalability) to completely restructure our website in terms of setting out a hierarchy. For example - the old structure : country / city / city area Where we had about 3500 nicely interlinked pages for relevant things like taxis, hotels, apartments etc in that city : We needed to change the structure to be : country / region / area / city / cityarea So as patr of the change we put in place lots of 301s for the permanent movement of pages to the new structure and then we tried to actually change the physical on-page links too. Unfortunately we have left a good 600 or 700 links that point to the old pages, but are picked up by the 301 redirect on page, so we're slowly going through them to ensure the links go to the new location directly (not via the 301). So my question is (sorry for long waffle) : Whilst it must surely be "best practice" for all on-page links to go directly to the 'right' page, are we harming our own interlinking and even 'page rank' by being tardy in working through them manually? Thanks for any help anyone can give.
On-Page Optimization | | TinkyWinky0 -
Prevent link juice to flow on low-value pages
Hello there! Most of the websites have links to low-value pages in their main navigation (header or footer)... thus, available through every other pages. I especially think about "Conditions of Use" or "Privacy Notice" pages, which have no value for SEO. What I would like, is to prevent link juice to flow into those pages... but still keep the links for visitors. What is the best way to achieve this? Put a rel="nofollow" attribute on those links? Put a "robots" meta tag containing "noindex,nofollow" on those pages? Put a "Disallow" for those pages in a "robots.txt" file? Use efficient Javascript links? (that crawlers won't be able to follow)
On-Page Optimization | | jonigunneweg0