Irrelevant Landing Pages are Ranking on Google SERP

[RuchiPardal]

Hi,

I have noticed that Google likes to rank random pages on my site higher in the SERPs than the actual relevant content page for that service.

Please let me know why it is happening?

[donford]

Hi Ruchi,

Can you provide an example of a page and the expected page?

There could be a number of reasons why this is happening, for anybody to get specific we need to see what we are working with.

Thank you,

Don

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

How do you decide that "actual relevant content page for that service"? Is it just because the page H1 has that service name or you actually did keyword research, specifically targeted that page to be a landing page for the query you are talking about and backed up your page with relevant internal and external links to increase page authority?

If you think about it, pretty much always you see index page of  websites ranking for most of keywords, even though there are service (or any internal) pages, which "should" be ranking for those keywords. And all that happening due to improper (or lack) of optimization.

Hope this helps.

[Eric_Rohrback]

If you really believe the page that's ranking shouldn't be and you have another similar or duplicate page, then I would set the canonical tag pointing to the original/better page you have on your site. If you're using the landing page for something like email only, and have another page on the site dedicated to the topic then I would use a no-index tag on the landing page to prevent it from being indexed.

Both cases will send a signal to Google to not include the landing page in the index.

If you can provide examples of what you're seeing, I think we could give you some actionable advice how to proceed.

[RuchiPardal]

Hi Donford,

When I search .NET Jobs in Bangalore in Google.co.in, this URL http://www.wisdomjobs.com/jobsearch/jobs-in-bangalore-bengaluru is ranking in SERP whereas the correct URL for searched keyword should be http://www.wisdomjobs.com/jobsearch/dotnet-jobs-jobs-in-bangalore.. The same problem is happening in most of the keywords.

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[RuchiPardal]

Hi Dmitrii Kustov,

I am talking about a job portal. If user is searching seo job in Sanjose then Google should rank landing page in which seo jobs in Sanjose are listed but in my case, Google is ranking landing page in which SEO Jobs are not listed or if SEO Jobs are listed then city is different.

[RuchiPardal]

Hi Eric,

Canonical tags are already implemented on the website.

[DmitriiK]

Ok, so how do you make sure that seo sanjose jobs page is optimized? are you using breadcrumbs? Are you using schema breadcrumbs? what about url? any text/content, which targets seo job in sanjose besides the actual jobs?

[RuchiPardal]

When I search .NET Jobs in Bangalore in Google.co.in, this URL http://www.wisdomjobs.com/jobsearch/jobs-in-bangalore-bengaluru is ranking in SERP whereas the correct URL for searched keyword should be http://www.wisdomjobs.com/jobsearch/dotnet-jobs-jobs-in-bangalore.. The same problem is happening in most of the keywords.

[DmitriiK]

What page do you rank at? I can't find your website in rankings at all.

P.S. on .net jobs in title it says "jobs jobs", as well as in url.