Ranked page is not desired page

[trumpfinc]

I have a question on a problem I am currently faced with.  There is a certain keyword that my employer wants to rank for. The good news is that sometimes it does rank in the top 5 pages of Google. (It drops in and out) The bad news is that it is going to a page that we need to keep, but not the ideal place we want people who are looking for that keyword to go to.

I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with this type of situation and what tactic they used to get people to the better page.

[jesse-landry]

This is incredibly interesting because I wanted to come here this morning and talk about pretty much this exact topic. So I'm going to try and piggyback on your thread so as not to have 2 separate threads about the same thing but please tell me to leave if it seems more like a hijack.

As I said I am facing the exact same situation. A bit more detail:

We have a primary targeted keyword, let's call it "main keyword" that is a service. This particular page had a ton of black hat work done for it in the past. So there were thousands of poison links pointing to the page "main-keyword.html" and what I did was after spending as much time as I could manually removing links, I finally gave up and changed the URL so that these links would 404. So now the page's URL is "main-keyword-services.html"

This seemed to work great at first. We hit page 2 of the SERPs about 10 days later and all of those poison links were no longer listed in GWT. That felt really good. But then the carousel kept a-swingin' and the main-keyword-services.html page dropped way out of the SERPs.

Now this is where it gets interesting: We also have a page on our blog featuring an infographic dedicated to these services. That URL is "main-keyword-infographic.html"

This page is ranking on page 2 of the SERPs and that's with very little link-building efforts. Of course these two pages are connected internally, so it'd be nice if both would rank. (I built this through EGOL's advice way back of trying to get multiple pages to rank for one keyword as my competitors were doing.) But right now I really don't want the infographic page to beat out the main services page.

All I can think to do is continue my link building efforts, and that's what I would have come here to tell you mr. bigbadwolf. However I feel like there's something I'm missing.

So I'm dying to see any input from the rest of the community. Sorry my post wasn't very helpful to you, TC, but perhaps together we will find what we're looking for. Unfortunately (or heck, maybe fortunately) I'm pretty sure all it means is we need to kick-up our SEM efforts.

It's frustrating for me because our competitors are outranking us with nothing but black hat tactics. Links from hip hop forums, fake tumblr and weebly accounts and stupid hair-removal blogs. It's a link service they are purchasing and they have been for some time, and it works for all of them. I refuse to stoop to that level but I can feel my boss getting close to saying "no, it works for them we're going back to buying links." I mean they've been ranking for like 8 months with these tactics. WTH!?

Okay thanks all

[jesse-landry]

I'm going to attempt to "bump" this thread as I'm very disappointed that it hasn't gained any responses..

If anybody has any input we'd love to hear it!

[EGOL]

First, give thanks if you have a page ranking well for a valuable keyword.  This really isn't a problem - you have an opportunity.

If your preferred page is not ranking highest for this keyword then get to work improving it.  The page that is beating it must be a really good page or,  you have bad optimization, poison links, low visitor engagement or some other problem with your preferred page.

If the undesired page is extremely powerful and you can't move your preferred page above it, figure out how to move the traffic to the page that you want them to see.  We use "house ads" and very obvious links to what we want the visitor to see.  If visitor really wants to see your preferred page and you have a big, contrasting, inviting ad to tell them what you got above the fold and really obvious then he is going to click it.  If he doesn't click it then he doesn't give a damn about your preferred page or you suck at making ads.  

[jesse-landry]

Well for me the preferred page is not ranking as I have recently changed the URL. At least that's my assumption even though it ranked high for a couple days.

The sites that are beating it have link profiles containing completely irrelevant links from random forums, fake poorly written blog article submissions, and disgusting poison directories. The entire first page of results for this keyword is filled by black-hat SEO tactics.

The page outranking my main page isn't ranking that high either. It's just ranking above the desired. Again I feel that the issue here is that the URL is new and that time and a little proper link-building will fix it, but I can't tell you how frustrating it is that the market I'm competing for is winning with black hat tactics and poorly constructed websites.

[jesse-landry]

And people keep saying "just give it time and they will be penalized," but it's been this way for 9 months now.

How many algo updates/refreshes have happened in these 9 months? When's it gonna take?

See my frustration!?

[EGOL]

See my frustration!?

Yes.  I see it.   I see some of this in my own SERPs.

In my SERPs that target items that are heavily purchased at Christmas the spammers buy a big load of links in the fall, get the rankings just before Christmas, then cut the links.   Pisses me off every year.