Homepage no longer showing in Google.co.uk

[TWSI]

Hi guys,

Has anyone ever had this before? My clients website was appearing 4 & 5 in Google.co.uk for the keyword 'voltage optimisation'.

Since moving up in the rankings after furiously optimising the website we have now gotten to position 3 in Google.co.uk but the homepage ranking has disappeared and now is just displaying our 'what is voltage optimisation' page.  I'm guessing Google feels that this page is more useful to someone searching 'voltage optimisation' but my client wants answers?!

It's almost like Google have said, "if you want to take position 3 were only going to list one of your pages" because everytime we drop back down to position 4 our homepage appears position 5.

[CommT]

Maybe google is testing the two landing pages to see which is better for the user?  I am assuming here that Google has signals that indicate whether a site/page is useful or not to the people using the query to find them. I've noticed this sort of thing happen to my sites and it always settles down in the end.

As for your client - I'm in-house now, but when I was agency-side I would have found a questioning client tricky. I think though, that honesty is the best policy - even if you have to say "I don't know why Google is behaving this way. I am looking into possible reasons why this could be happening, but I may never find the answer. I am monitoring your site and am continuing to optimise your homepage for the keyword, 'voltage optimisation'."

Sometimes clients can be difficult, but they have to understand that some of the things Google does are a complete mystery, and that's just the way it is.

[TimHolmes]

It is normal for Google to optimise there own serps to deliver the most relevant pages, as such your "what is voltage optimisation" is clearly deemed the more relevant for users searching. From my experience the home page tends to be displayed mainly when surrounding branded search.

[Zippy-Bungle]

Generally I find that what happens with a new website is that I start off with several category pages that rank for a number of main keywords. As the site develops and we look to increase rankings you tend to build specialist pages that then overtake the main category pages. So here is an example of what you see in Moz

In this case we were optimising for a type of steel called S690QL1. To start with it ranked in SERPS on the page for High yield steel. As we optimised the site further we saw the page S690QL replace the high yield steel page in rankings (on june 20th). Then on August 29th S690QL1 then replace the S690QL page and it now looks to be at number 3.

So you should be able to see something similar in your "analyse a keyword" on moz pro.

7ICxSsL

[TWSI]

Thanks for your responses, I didn't think there would be a straight forward answer and it is most likely that Google feels that this is the most relevant page for that particular search query which is what I have told them. They are wanting suggestions on how to replace this page with the homepage?! They just don't understand how it use to be there along with other page and no it isn't.  Interestingly if you search in https://www.google.ie the SERP's display the same as .co.uk use to display.

http://puu.sh/bilvR/9fa76f4cd0.png

[Zippy-Bungle]

LOL. Sounds like an opportunity for an upsell to me

I'd look for some variants where the home page does rank 1 and say "well, here's something we managed to arrange for you....."