google pointing to same page?

[mowse73]

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Hi,
I have noticed that most search results for my site will nearly always point to the same page. I will get the description from one product but google points to the same page for lots of various descriptions.

eg: title page 1
description : page 2
url page 1

title page 1
description page 4
url page 1
The page it refers to is not my home page

if anyone can understand this question i would appreciate any advice.

thx Martin

[BenFox]

If the link from the SERP taking you through to the same page I would guess that you've used the description from page 2 in the body of the page 1 and that page 1 just has higher metrics.

PM or post the site and I can take a look (include the keywords you're searching for).

[Brendon]

Ah, sounds like you pagejacked yourself. Not as hard as you'd think. Are you using redirects anywhere, especially 302s?

[aaclapham]

I have a similar problem on two or my blogs - every time I do a new post, Google indexes it really fast however just points to my homepage and not the blog post url. Had some seo friends look at it, and they are stumped.

[Brendon]

Um, could be a pagejacking thing again, or just G being rubbish at canonical selection - have you checked your HTTP header returns? If you've let a 302 slip through, that could explain it. It's just possible there are URL malformation issues too, I suppose, but that doesn't jibe well with quick indexing

[BenFox]

@aaclapham - it could be that you're home page isn't passing enoguh juice down to individual entries for them to outrank it - especially for the length of time that the same content is present on both pages. Do you have a page that displays content that is no longer on the homepage? if so how does that rank when you search for it? It could also be that your individual posts aren't recorded in the index.

[Brendon]

No, that doesn't fit, the new postings are being indexed, but G is selecting the wrong URL, by the sound of it. That suggests a pagejacking, although without seeing examples, I couldn't be sure

[BenFox]

Just because the content is being indexed doesn't mean that it's on the right URL. Couldn't it be getting indexed on the homepage of the blog?

Although TBH blogs aren't my area of expertise but I know off page factors can outweigh onpage factors which is why some sites end up with their homepage ranking for terms that have far better optimised pages deeper down.

[aaclapham]

This post: Little Mistress AW10 Collection shows up on a title search in Google as:

Designer Labels, Mens Fashion, Womens Fashion
20 Sep 2010 ... Little Mistress AW10 Collection The new Autumn/Winter 2010 collection by Little Mistress reflect the current trends, colours, and styles to ...
designerlabels.org.uk/ - Cached - Similar

After the posts drop off the home page they either stay indexed as above or just disappear completely.

[Brendon]

OK, when you say "title search" do you mean with the title as the search term, or using the intitle: special operator?

I'm seeing a dupe content issue here - see Little Mistress AW10 Collection vs Little Mistress AW10 Collection

Same content, different URLs => canonical selction issue, and I'm seeing the domain root returned for the title as a search term. I think you may have just slightly outsmarted yourself a bit here. When a post drops off the HP, canonical selection issue makes returning a deep page over root hard, so you get root returned as the "best result", hence the listings look odd to you. But, G *is* sending you to the domain root, when is says it will, so it's not a pagejacking, I think you've just accidentally locked out your deep content with duplicate routes to the same content, effectively.

Does that all make sense?

[aaclapham]

OK, when you say "title search" do you mean with the title as the search term, or using the intitle: special operator?

I'm seeing a dupe content issue here - see Little Mistress AW10 Collection vs Little Mistress AW10 Collection

Same content, different URLs => canonical selction issue, and I'm seeing the domain root returned for the title as a search term. I think you may have just slightly outsmarted yourself a bit here. When a post drops off the HP, canonical selection issue makes returning a deep page over root hard, so you get root returned as the "best result", hence the listings look odd to you. But, G *is* sending you to the domain root, when is says it will, so it's not a pagejacking, I think you've just accidentally locked out your deep content with duplicate routes to the same content, effectively.

Does that all make sense?

I have amended my Robots Meta plugin to prevent any indexing of archive pages such as tags. Will that be enough or do I need to do something else?

Thanks.
Andrew.

[Brendon]

Um, should be enough, but it may take some time to take full effect, since that works via crawl control. Once a URL is in there, the robots meta will take several goes to get the message across, but it should improve matters in the future, and gradually solve historical issues. The best solution would be a 301 redirect, but depending on the techy bits, that may be hard to do just for dupe pages, and to target correctly. It would essentially delete the dupes from the index quite quickly, and since they are near 100% dupes you're not losing anything really

[mowse73]

Hi Brendon,
Thx for your response.
I do have some 301 directs set up and i am using wordpress.
I have checked my sites c panel stats and it says i have had four hundread and sixty two 302 redirects this month and one thousand two hundread 301 redirects.
i'm not sure what pagejacked means. is it reversable?

[Brendon]

OK, if i's what I think it is, the 302's are the problem. Are they occurring on the page/s you are having problems with? Can you see that in your cPanel stats?

>> i'm not sure what pagejacked means

Basically, you confuse the search engine, and it gets 2 or mare pages muddled up, so you think you are being sent to one, but you end up on another. You can do it to other peoples sites, or more likely you can do it to your own, which is what has happened to you, I think. There is a longer, techier explanation, but unless you're fairly clear on the differences between a 301 and 302 redirect or instance, it won't make any more sense. Yes, it's reversible, once you get rid of the 302's, preferably by replacing them with 301's.

Without seeing example data, I can't say for sure whether it's the problem or not though, I'm afraid

[mowse73]

Hi Brendon. thx again for your help.
when i checked my stats for today i have noticed that i have about 12 302's and they all seem to be coming from when people leave there spammy comments.


for example
/wp-comments-post.php
Http Code: 302 Date: Sep 23 20:31:05 Http Version: HTTP/1.0 Size in Bytes: -
Referer: -
Thx again