Google Ranking Wrong Page

[cpapciak]

The company I work for started with a website targeting one city. Soon after I started SEO for them, they expanded to two cities. Optimization was challenging, but we managed to rank highly in both cities for our keywords.

A year or so later, the company expanded to two new locations, so now 4 total. At the time, we realized it was going to be tough to rank any one page for four different cities, so our new SEO strategy was to break the website into 5 sections or minisites consisting of 4 city-targeted sites, and our original site which will now be branded as more of a national website.

Our URL structures now look something like this:
www.company.com
www.company.com/city-1
www.company.com/city-2
www.company.com/city-3
www.company.com.city-4

Now, in the present time, all is going well except for our original targeted city. The problem is that Google keeps ranking our original site (which is now national) instead of the new city-specific site we created. I realize that this is probably due to all of the past SEO we did optimizing for that city.

My thoughts are that Google is confused as to which page to actually rank for this city's keyword terms and I was wondering if canonical tags would be a possible solution here, since the pages are about 95% identical.

Anyone have any insight? I'd really appreciate it!

[danatanseo]

I'm not sure that a canonical tag is going to effectively solve the problem. Also, if implemented, it would completely undermine your original homepage. I don't think you are going to want to do that.

Have you analyzed your inbound links and the anchor text associated with it? It's quite probable that you attracted a number of inbound links that contain anchor text specific to your original city and that this is a big contributing factor to the "national" page outranking the "city" page for said "city." While not impossible to address, trying to get the folks who are linking to you to update their links may not be productive either.

The one thing you can control is how you are linking internally and what anchor text is pointing to what page. I think if you send enough signals from your own pages that this new "city" minisite is the right and best location for people searching for information or products pertaining to that city, eventually it will bump up ahead of the other page.

THis could take a good amount of time. Depending on how long the original page had to build up its links and authority, it probably will take at least that long, and maybe quite a big longer to build up the same kind of authority on the new page.

I know this isn't probably the definitive answer you're looking for, but I really do think that this one is a matter of time, effort and patience.

Dana

[cpapciak]

Many thanks, Dana. What you described was pretty much my gut instinct as to what was going on. The funny thing is that all rankings look fine on Bing and Yahoo, go figure, haha.

-Chris

[danatanseo]

You are welcome Chris. Good luck and let us know when it starts showing the right way around!