Internal Linking Question For Better Serp Experience For Users

Wrong Category Showing First on the SERPS

[zampik]

Hey everyone,

I have a very simple internal linking structure on a 30-40 page website. Structure is as shown below;

example.com
example.com\category-a\a-widget.aspx
example.com\category-b\b-widget.aspx
example.com\category-c\c-widget.aspx
example.com\category-d\d-widget.aspx
example.com\category-e\e-widget.aspx
example.com\category-e\e-widget-with-glasses.aspx
example.com\category-e\e-widget-with-lenses.aspx
example.com\links.aspx
example.com\news.aspx
example.com\contact-us.aspx
.
.
.

My home page links to 90% of my internal pages (I have a couple deeper level pages like widget E which doesn't get linked to from any page other than the e-widget.aspx page) and all of my internal pages link back to all of that 90% with a consistent menu structure for easy navigation.

Lately i have been having a problem... Lets say b-widget and c-widget page has some overlapping content. B widget page talks about "widget hats" and C widget page talks about "widget hats with red stripes". (That wasn't the perfect example but I tried).

Lately, C widget page started to show up first on the serps and B widget page is showing up on page 2 or worse where the user is really looking for Widget B page. (Noticed this while looking at my visitor keyword logs)

I was wondering if I could tweak some internal linking without alienating users to tweak the Serps? (Please Remember that the links are part of a menu structure)

Keyword tweaking on either page is probably not the best option. I am sure that they are the way they should be.

Also, should I change the links to "Contact Us", "News" to server side links rather then regular hyperlinks to prevent pagerank flow to these pages? I don't care if they rank well really...

Also, I can't seem to be able to get any more links to my Widget B page from other sites because of very limited content on this topic.

[edited by: tedster at 3:45 pm (utc) on June 20, 2007]
[edit reason] switfch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

This is the kind of thing that changes as Google shifts their algo. I've had the same issue with search results on large and relatively small sites -- and it does come and go without my doing anything,

My advice is not to make changes based on this one moment. Too many changes can really mess with a site, over time. So give Google some weeks to do better before you even think of making changes.

My home page links to 90% of my internal pages

And if you do get around to making changes at some point, that is where I would begin. In my experience, not only does that kind of navigation not scale well as you grow a site, but it does not give Google any real sense of your site's Information Architecture [webmasterworld.com].

Still, I say wait a while. This is mostly Google's job.

[edited by: tedster at 5:07 pm (utc) on June 24, 2007]

[zampik]

Thank you tedster... I will wait for a while to see what happens, but this has been going on for at least 4-6 months I believe.

Also right after I did this post, I have realized that on the SERPS, my site started to show with it's sub-pages on at least 3-4 different keyword searches, which made me very happy and hopefully it will help the users and my traffic a lot as well...

I believe this means that my site has a big trust by google and it might be also due to the natural and related backlinks that I have gathered.

PS: My site is only 1 year old, structured as I explained on the above post.