As some of you know, sometimes Google seemingly likes to rank random pages on your site higher in the SERPs than the actual relevant content page for that product or service; and despite months of quality link building and promotion, you can’t quite get the listings to switch places. This can lead to low time on site, high bounce rate, low conversions, and grumpy clients. As frustrating as this may be, I’ve stumbled upon easy solution that will allow you to pull the old switcheroo on your irrelevant listing.
Let me use a personal example…
Our inbound marketing agency, Savvy Panda, has been working on building our rank for the keyword “Milwaukee SEO.” At an SEOMoz keyword difficulty level of 49%, it’s not the hardest keyword in the world to rank for, and after only a week of starting to target “Milwaukee SEO,” I was happy to see one of our pages being ranked already sixth in Google SERPs.
So why, after about three months, was I starting to get really frustrated? I was frustrated because the page showing up in the sixth position in the SERP wasn’t our actual SEO services landing page. Instead, it was a tag category from our blog for “Milwaukee SEO” that was ranking and our actual SEO landing page, with all its relevant content and important information, landed back on the far distant land of page two.
So I did what most of you would try. I tweaked the on-site SEO and started working building links to our SEO landing page to try and boost its SEO power and ranking in the SERP. I thought, “While surely if Google sees both more internal and external links to this page it must be smart enough to swap it?!” However, after two months of this, I did not see any improvement, and my blog tag still ranked at #5. Arggg.
Determined to make the more relevant page get indexed correctly, I decided to get a little risky and see how I could influence the change on my own. I hoped and prayed that it wouldn’t get my site off the first page all together. But figured it would be worth a shot because, after all, our SEO landing page is a better fit for that search term and should be ranking higher than our blog tag. It was time to pull the old switcheroo:
Our company is also a high-end Joomla web design firm, and thus, we run our website on Joomla. There’s a useful component called SH404SEF which allows you to manage all your URLs, Redirects, 404s, and meta data in one spot. If you’re not a Joomla user, there are probably plugins for this or you might have to simply do some of these steps manually.
STEP 1: Find the irrelevant page URL that’s currently being indexed
Go into your URL manager and pull up the URL for the page that’s currently being indexed. In my example, it was SavvyPanda.com/tag/Milwaukee-seo.html. Copy the search engine friendly (SEF) URL, we will be using this in the next step.
Then change the SEF URL to something new and different. In my case, I simply changed “Tag” with “blog” into the URL like so: SavvyPanda.com/blog/Milwaukee-SEO.html. Once changed, save your listing and go back into your URL Manager.
STEP 2: Create a 301 redirect from the copied URL to the page you want ranked
The next step will create a 301 permanent redirect from the SEF URL that you just changed and copied (the URL currently being ranked) and have it redirect to the current landing page you want to rank for and is better related to the search term.
SEF404SEF allows us to easily do this with their alias function; however, you can manually create 301 redirects in your .htaccess file if your component doesn’t support it. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to manually create a 301 redirect on .htaccess.
STEP 3: Get things cleared up with Google
The last step is you need to tell Google that the pages’ URLs have changed and you’d like them to get re-indexed. Back in March, Google added a new feature in their webmaster tools called “Fetch as GoogleBot,” which allows you to check the performance of pages and then submit them into Google for immediate re-indexing.
Log into your Webmaster Tools and use the left side menu to click on “Diagnostics” and then on “Fetch as Googlebot.” Here you should type in the SEF URL you just created a 301 redirect for. (This is the page that is currently ranking high.) Once Google Webmaster Tools successfully fetches the URL, click the “Success” link to review the page report as Google sees it. What you are looking for is that Google successfully recognizes the 301 permanent redirect you just made. It should look like this:
STEP 4: Resubmit it to Google and watch the switcheroo happen
Once everything checks out with your 301 redirect, you can go back to the “Fetch as GoogleBot” main page and click the “Submit to Index” button. Here you will have two options: index only the page or index the page and all linked page. Either one will work; however, in my case I’ve been choosing the “and all linked pages” option.
Once all of this is complete, it typically takes 5-7 days for Google to make the update in the SERPs. Here’s my disclaimer: I have only performed this a half-dozen times. However, I have found success each time with this method. Because it’s only been done a handful of times, it’s definitely not tried and true. So, I would recommend trying it out with some low-level pages to test results before attempting to make a switch on an important page.
I hope this helps you get more relevant search results ranked where they should be in the appropriate search term. Sometimes even Google needs a little help correctly indexing the right pages. After all, they have over a trillion unique URLs!
