Wrong Pages Ranking

[Ham1979]

Good Afternoon

We had an issue a while ago with the incorrect pages ranking in Google for some of our key terms. For example the page ranking for the term in Hotels in Spain was an individual information page for one particular hotel in Spain rather than the top level page which is optimised for "Hotels in Spain"

The individual property page was ranking around 36-40 so we tightened up all the internal linking structure to ensure the term "Hotels in Spain" was pointing to the correct page and de-optimised the individual property page for the term.

After a few weeks, everything seemed to be working and we were ranking top of second page for correct page however, ranking report today has reversed our good fortune and the incorrect page is ranking in a low position

Any further suggestions or advise would be very much appreciated. Ideally, I don't want to remove the page that is ranking as it's still relevant for a search for that particular hotel

[badgergravling]

I'd wait a while before worrying - rankings can be all over the place for 24 hour periods. I've had specific terms go up and down 300+ positions over the course of a week recently, and there seems to be quite a bit of change going on.

If the desired page hasn't recovered in the space of 1 week+, and you've sorted all internal links, then I'd look at external link sources and see what's happening there that could be triggering the confusion. For instance, a newly discovered link to the individual hotel page?

Additional relevant content always helps as well

If you don't want to rank for the individual hotel at all, you could canonicalise it to leave it on the site and working for visitors, but obviously you'd lose any rankings for that particularly hotel name.

[Ham1979]

Thanks for your reply

We have recently updated and increased the length of the content on the top level pages and analysed the external links. It's frustrating as everything had seemed to work for a while and the correct page ranked but of all a sudden this reversed. The correct pages always rank higher than the incorrect ones but for some reason Google is confused and seeing the individual hotel pages as relevant for the terms

I'll wait a bit longer and see what happens