My worst performing pages all have this /products/ URL structure...?

[Brocberry]

I rank first for my brand "example" on example.com

But my product pages simply don't rank. Frankly, I don't know where they rank, but it's not top 40. They are indexed, as searching "site:example.com" returns all my site's pages.

My product pages are outranked even by some of my shorter blog posts about the product.

My product pages are the only ones on the site that use a folder/directory in the url.

example.com**/products/**product-one is nowhere but this is the main product page.

example.com/short-blog-article-about-product-one.

Is the fact that the product pages are with the slashes a red herring and I should be looking for anther cause? Or is google saying, well these product pages are the only ones in these sort of path and therefore we'll treat them as secondary sources?

Thanks

[Visiblics]

Well, looking at the scenario you have mentioned doesn't show anywhere that slashes are that cause of low search engine ranking. in-fact slashes doesn't even play any role in search engine position.

You need to strengthen your inner pages by acquiring some quality one way links (Do not purchase links), build link manually and gradually with the help of articles, PRs, guest posts, comments, blogging, etc.

You may want to PM me the url of your website to look into the real problem.

[TroyCarlson]

Also, while URL structure can help, there are dozens of other things that can affect ranking.  Does it use a CMS that renders the pages really slowly, but the homepage is solid HTML that pops up in no time?  Do your product pages have useful/informative title tags and

tags?  Is there good textual content on the pages that would pull in search results?

There are loads of other things to consider.

[Brocberry]

I should add a few things:

• Bing ranks these product pages at No1 for the respective products.

• There is far more content in the product pages than in the blogs pages that outrank them.

[irvingw]

That could not be your issue. I would look elsewhere. If you provide the actual URL we could take a look at it and see what could be done to improve rankings for the product pages.

[Brocberry]

Thanks

November  Edit. I've removed the link.

[TroyCarlson]

Hmmm...one thing I notice is that you have the

tag say "Reviber Products" on each product page, rather than being the name of the product (for example:

Reviber Zen Physio

".  That would be my first, easy fix to help boost the products.

Also, you may be stuffing your title tags a little much.  The title for the Zen Physio page is 77 characters (Reviber Zen Physio | Percussion Hand Held Deep Tissue Body Massager | Reviber)  You should try and keep it under 70.

[Brocberry]

Thanks, yes I know about the h1, those issues are also common to the much better performing pages.

[Brocberry]

Edit.

[TheHouse]

Hello,

Not sure if you figured it out but looking at your most recent ranking it seems you still have this issue.   Your Title tags are just fine.  Yes the H1 could be optimized but I've seen worse cases of H1s so this can't be it.  What I did find out is that your product page has duplicate content shared with other pages therefore Google is picking the page with absolute unique copy as best option.

Check out where your testimonial's copy reside: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Up+until+two+years+ago+I+was+a+gym+bunny+exercise+freak%2C+then+ill+health+meant+I+had+to+stop+exercising+on+a+regular+basis.+This+almost+drove+me+to+insanity.%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

I could be wrong but I don't think you were planning on having this page indexed:

http://www.reviber.co.uk/reviber%20plus%20success%20toning%20my%20legs%20and%20arms

You could fix this in a various ways, robots.txt/canonical but I would make sure google doesn't crawl your "testimonial" urls. .

Hope this helps,

Milosz

[Brocberry]

Hi Milosz, thanks very much for your reply.  I suspected the testimonial pages too. I have found a canonical meta field in my CMS, so I've added a canonical url in the header for all the testimonials for just one product to see how that works.

Hopefully the canonical meta data will be somewhat equivalent you the robots suggestion. I could look at the robots file if recommended.

For the testimonials to which I've added a canonical url (the product page), I have also taken those testimonials out of the sitemap.

I now wonder if I should meta noindex them too? What I don't want to do is stop google visiting the testimonial pages until they have crawled the new canonical meta tag, and I don't know how a noindex would affect that.