E-ccomerce SEO conundrum

[Jonathan_Murrell]

I work on the marketing for an eccomerce website.  And lately we have been having an issue with the "wrong" page ranking and the right page "being nearly unfindable."  For example the product bit o honey - there is a brand page, category page and individual product pages.  We want the category page to be the top level bit o honey "hub" page and have placed all of the products onto it.  We've written a nice description about Bit O Honey on that page and spent time running social campaigns around that page to try and get social activity on page as well.  There have even been a few back links from blogs or reviews onto that category page.  It also has the highest page authority among all of the bit o honey pages.  But for some odd reason it is always the absolute last result among the 3 options when i search?  In fact the only time I can even find it is if I type in about 3 sentences worth of text from that page and it find exact match.  I'm really pretty confused as to why the highest page authority page with the most content, activity and link profile, would have the worst ranking capability among the three nearly identical pages.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Hi Jonathan,

Could there be something technical hurting that page? A meta robots block? A robots.txt block? Perhaps overoptimization of the page?

If you can share the URL, that will be helpful to try and provide some ideas for how to fix the situation.

Mark

[KarlBantleman]

Hi Jonathan,

Have you looked at the links to the page you want to rank compared to the links to the other 2 pages? it may be that the other 2 pages just have better quality links to them. If that is the case then get in touch with the webmasters and ask them to change the link.

Alternatively, if you have been building heavily to the page you want to rank, the page may have received a penalty from Google (not accusing you of doing so by the way, just a possibility!). As Mark said, if you can supply us with the URL of the 3 pages then we can have a look into it for you.

[Jonathan_Murrell]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the responses.

The url's are

http://www.candygalaxy.com/bit-o-honey/   (ideal landing page)

http://www.candygalaxy.com/bit-o-honey-bulk/

http://www.candygalaxy.com/brands/Bit%252dO%252dHoney.html

[Mark_Ginsberg]

OK - if this is the case, to force Google's hand (so to speak), I would canonical these brand pages over to the target pages you want your visitors to land on - this won't remove them from display on the site like a 301 redirect would, but it will point to the search engines that these pages should be shown over the brand pages in the SERPs. That's what I would do to solve your problem.

Mark

[Jonathan_Murrell]

Thanks Mark!

[Saijo.George]

I would start by adding a higher priority for http://www.candygalaxy.com/bit-o-honey/ in your sitemap.

You use an H3 for the tile on http://www.candygalaxy.com/bit-o-honey/ , while http://www.candygalaxy.com/bit-o-honey-bulk/#.UcOrvj4smF4 and http://www.candygalaxy.com/brands/Bit%252dO%252dHoney.html has an H1. I would also change that

[Everett]

I disagree and would advise against this. First of all, these are not the same pages and so it is an improper use of the rel canonical tag, which means - at best - Google could just choose to ignore this at any time and the problem would still be there.

Second, if he has a link-based penalty (looking at his link profile for that page this is very possible) placing a rel canonical tag on the two ranking pages that points to the penalized/filtered page could cause those two to stop ranking as well, leaving him with no traffic at all for that brand - a bit worse than sending users to the wrong page.

Jonathan,

I had a look a the external links to that page and out of 7 links, according to OSE,  6 of them have that exact anchor text "Bit O Honey" with the other one being "Bit O Honey for Visit here".

One of them is on a list of "great links" for an android app website that is HEAVILY spammed with really bad links, such as "female escort services" in various countries.

Another is on a list of links at the bottom of a totally irrelevant post that is also irrelevant to the blog it's on. The blog is about hotels and travel. The post is about cooking chicken with wine. The link is about "Bit O Honey" candy, and it is found also near links for window blinds and ice cream.

The other links, with the exception of one that is debatable, are all along these same lines in terms of quality. If you were to rel canonical (essentially a redirect as far as search engines are concerned) the other two pages to this one you would be putting those pages at risk too.

My advice is to get rid of these links. If you can't get rid of them, disavow them. Wait a few weeks and if you don't come back into the rankings for that page file a reinclusion request. And of course build more high-quality links to that page if you can.

Last but not least, fire your link builder.