Ranking for keyword I don't optimize for & Other oddities

[artscienceweb]

Hi Moz Community!

I've been working with a clients website for about a year now. They were hit with the original Panda update because of some spammy links from a shady SEO firm. We've made a decent climb back but not a full recovery. There are some weird things happening that I would love some insight into.

1. Ranking for keywords we don't optimize for:

I noticed some low keyword volume for a keyword term that is close to our main term, but is slightly different. We don't optimize for this term at all on our website. We rank third for this term, and actually show site links in the result, which doesn't happen for any of our other pages.

2. Index not found when doing site: search:

Other oddity is that when you search site:www.mywebsite.com, I see all the pages within the site except the homepage. Not sure whats going on here, but when I fetch the homepage in GWMT, it returns the homepage. When you query the homepage by itself, it also ranks.

Any help would be appreciated!

Regards,

J

[Linda-Vassily]

For the first question, Google has become pretty sophisticated in making connections, so ranking for a keyword similar to one you are optimizing for isn't unusual, especially a low search volume keyword that might not have much competition.

For the second question, it's hard to say without knowing the site, but did you do the site search that way, with the www? Is your homepage www or non www?

[EGOL]

I noticed some low keyword volume for a keyword term that is close to our main term, but is slightly different. We don't optimize for this term at all on our website.

This is called "long tail traffic".  Most of my traffic comes in for "terms that are close to my mail term but slightly different".  I honestly make a living off of this stuff.

We rank third for this term, and actually show site links in the result, which doesn't happen for any of our other pages.

Awesome.  Go out for beers.

Index not found when doing site: search:

This can happen when you have another page on the site that is optimized similar to the homepage - but a little better in the eyes of google.  If you click to the end of the SERPs (if you have a small enough site) you might see that the homepage is filtered.

[artscienceweb]

Thanks All,

The issue with the lower traffic keyword is that the main keyword I was ranking for was receiving 20k avg. monthly searches and the new keyword receives 50 searches (using the keyword planner tool). So you can imagine, I used to be position #4 for the prime keyword, now I'm #19. So my traffic has dropped significantly.

My homepage uses the www, I used the site:www.mysite.com and my homepage does not show up, I have 57 results and have checked each SERP. When I use the site:http://mysite.com, my homepage shows up as the first result.

[Linda-Vassily]

A webpage can rank for more than one keyword and that's a good thing. Having the low volume keyword ranking well wouldn't hurt the main keyword's ranking. However it could be that Google's algorithm decided that the page is better suited for the lower-volume query. I would take another look at the page, including links and citations and see if you see something there.

For the homepage issue, it still sounds like a subdomain issue, especially because you see it when you search the root domain, but not the www subdomain.