Multiple pages battling for same keyword

[rasmusbang]

Hi,

I have earlier had a post about this, but still I am in doubt. I posted: http://www.seomoz.org/q/page-not-being-indexed

The keyword "betsafe" in that question has now "bounced" back and is now the page shown in SERPS for the search keyword. This is great, however I don't know why. By checking the URL in OSE i have discovered that the page has in-links from SEOmoz.org. Which comes from the above questions thread.

Can it really be, that these 2 links from SEOmoz forum has done the difference? We appareantly have zero links from other sites to the URL, despite actually having them on another site.

Now we are having trouble with keyword: "bet365" which should show page http://www.betxpert.com/bookmakere/bet365 but does not (on google.dk).

I have optimized the page as far as I can stretch it without doing in in an unnatural way. Only thing left to do is bring down number of links.

What is your advice? Should I simply try to link build for the URL with the keyword - and then it will beat our other pages which seem to steal the SERPS?

-Rasmus

[Dr-Pete]

I'm not seeing any signs of indexation problems or issues with true duplicate content (duplicate URLs of the same page, essentially). I'm also not seeing many direct links to this page, so a link-based penalty (just on this page) is very unlikely. Unfortunately, we often don't report deep or low-quality links in OSE, so it could be that there are links we're not seeing that look spammy.

The other possibility is an anchor-text penalty, if you were hitting "bet365" too hard, but again, I'm not seeing evidence of that. Even across the whole site, your anchor text is fairly diverse.

I'm seeing you at #11 for "bet365" on Google.dk for this page:

http://www.betxpert.com/tvguide/bet365

Realistically, it's got a shorter URL, hits "bet365" in headers and text, and seems to have higher Page Authority. I think your internal links to that page might be stronger. I think your just making that page look stronger to Google.

It's really dangerous to try to de-rank a page - you can end up harming it in other ways. You could tone down the on-page cues a bit. You could also link this page directly to the page you want to rank. Currently, though, you're sending Google subtle cues that this page is stronger. You could also just try to build a few inbound links to the desired page - since neither page has many, a couple of links can make a difference.