Taken a canonical off a page to let it rank with new unique content - what more can I do?

[Kelly_Edwards]

A week ago, I took a canonical off of a page that was pointing to the homepage for a very big, generic search term for my brand as we felt that it could have been harming our rankings (as it wasn't a true canonical page).

A week in and our rankings for the term have dropped 7 positions out of page 1 and the page we want to rank instead is nowhere to be seen. Do I hang fire? As such a big search term, it's affecting traffic, but I don't want to make any rash decisions.

Here's a bit more info:

For arguments sake, let's call the search term we're going after 'Boots', with the URL where the canonical was placed of /boots. The canonical went to the root domain as we sell, well... boots.

At the time, the homepage was ranking for Boots on page 1 and we wanted to change this so that the Boots page ranked for that term... all logical right?

We did the following:

• Took off mentions of Boots from meta on the homepage and made sure it was optimised for on the boots page.
• Took the canonical off of /boots.
• Used GSC to fetch & ask Google to recrawl "/boots".
• Resubmitted the sitemap.

Do I hang fire on running back to the safety of ranking for boots on the homepage? Do I risk keyword cannibalisation by adding the search terms back to the homepage?

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Kelly

I work with eCommerce stores all the time and coincidentally some of those happen to be footwear sites. Anyway I'm sure it's just coincidence.

The problem you may have here could be multi-fold

1. Page Authority/Domain Authority - it may just be that because the home page has a high domain authority - (ie online reputation helped by back links from other high DA sites), that it was naturally easier to rank for contextually similar keywords to those that you were targeting for the home page.

The new page may have no backlinks whatsoever and therefore a low page authority (PA) so even though to you it appeared more relevant it may be really hard to rank quickly for the search terms Boots

2. Back links & Anchor text - The home page may well have back links through the anchor text Boots which may of course conflict with what you are trying to achieve for the new page, so it would not simply be enough to remove all mention of boots when other sites may be pointing at you through that keyword.

I don't think that simply waiting will make a lot of difference as Google updates dynamically now. But you may be able to influence how the page is treated internally by re-directing internal traffic through the keyword Boots.

Blog posts could be written citing the term Boots with back links to the new page.

Outside influencers may be able to write blog content or provide links back to you through the anchor text Boots.

Frankly if it's causing you problems internally by breaking this new page out and trying to rank for it I would always hold my hands up and re-canonicalise. You do not want to be accused of losing the company money. Keep the page there and maybe slide it across when more of the above has been achieved. Creating internal and getting backlinks for Boots will not make any difference as it's canonicalised to the home page. When you have waited a few months and can be more confident then maybe try again.

For sure you can't sit and wait as your credibility flies out of the window.

I have a client who sells a certain brand of sandals really well. His subcategories were tags so appended themselves to everything creating skinny content. We are just in the process of making them sub-categories. Frankly if Toe Post sandals fails to rank for the brand and is considered a subset or partial duplicate of sandals, then we will re-canonicalise pretty quickly back to sandals.

I hope that helps.

Sometime the logical way doesn't always achieve the best results.

Regards Nigel

[Kelly_Edwards]

Thank you Nigel,

Really helpful advice. I definitely don't want to sit back and wait to fall off that cliff... I'm a bit miffed that our search agency suggested that we take the canonical off without making the changes you've just suggested first.

Thanks again,

Kelly

[Nigel_Carr]

Yes they should have put some groundwork in place before doing it! Especially of they knew it was such an important page.

Regards

Nigel