Our website's index page is fluctuating in Google SERPs

[skalfa]

This post is deleted!

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi Alina,

One thing that I did just notice is that there isn't a canonical tag on your homepage and both these urls load with different page authority:

www.skadate.com/ pa65

www.skadate.com/index.php pa49

I would look at rectifying this straight away - I checked because you mentioned it was canonical and I did a quick search in the source code.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Alina,

You have a keyword cannibalisation problem here in that the two pages are well-optimised for the same term. This is quite a common problem for sites specialising in one particular product that is mentioned on its home page. An old post about this, but one that is still relevant, is here.

I am suspicious that the canonical tag is being ignored here because the pages are not identical or close to it... there is no duplication of content besides the topic being the same. In the past, Google has ignored the fact that pages are not the same and de-indexed pages based upon canonicalisation (see this post for Pete's experiment in the early days). I also had a client end up losing a huge number of rankings when they pointed all their internal canonical tags at the home page for two days by mistake. However, Google doesn't really want canonicalisation to work like this - it's meant to be for duplication.

I am seeing the home page back on top today - has this issue somewhat resolved itself or are you still seeing fluctuation?

[skalfa]

Matt, thank you for a response!

[skalfa]

Jane, thank you! It resolved itself