Specific queries go to non-specific pages

Very consistent behavior

[Tonearm]

For a very long time now, I've noticed that a search for "small round blue widget" on Google will point to my "Widgets" page, even though I have a page specifically about the small round blue widget. I even have <h1>Small Round Blue Widget</h1> on that specific page.

Is this because I have more internal links pointing to the Widgets page than the Small Round Blue Widget page? Would a sitemap.xml file help?

[tedster]

I see this a lot - both on the sites I work with and on the search results I get as a Google end user. It's very frustrating. I've been assuming it comes from weighting anchor text very high as an on-page factor.

[trakkerguy]

Tonearm - Do you find the page that is specific for "small round blue widget" at the end of serps (-950 penalty)?

Google doesn't like us trying to push a page and will now often send that page to the end of serps.

[Tonearm]

trakkerguy,

What is the best way to determine that? How can I figure out where my small round blue widget page is ranked for the query "small round blue widget"?

[trakkerguy]

There's probably more sophisticated ways, but I just do a search for "small round blue widget", and then a "find" for my url on the results page, and keep clicking next until you see the page of your site. It's probably on the last page of serps (-950) so with your preferences set to display 100 results per page, click on the "10" or last page of the serps.

[Tonearm]

The page of mine I'm talking about doesn't even seem to be in Google's index yet. I'll keep checking and report back here when I have more info. Thanks for the help thus far.

[QuantumEntanglement]

I see this a fair bit as well... a search for the title of Listing X returns the category page above it because it has such high PR/history. Sometimes the target listing will be the nested 2nd if there's not ANOTHER high PR page hogging that spot ;)

Come to think of it, google should be able to handle this one pretty easily if the listing structure followed the subdomain structure. And thinking about it now maybe it does, because the instances of this I'm thinking of, the target url is outside the subdirectory structure of the category url.

[fishfinger]

This seems to be a teething problem with sites in my (I admit limited) experience. I have a carefully optimised page that I want to rank and Google lists another page from my site that mentions that phrase once somewhere in passing. As Tedster says I think this is usually because if the page I WANT to rank is optimised for 'light green widgets with spots' then the page that links to it will show up for the anchor text because it has a good profile for 'green widgets'.

However it seems to sort itself out as the page ages.