Wrong Page in Serps on Interlinked Pages

[JS_Harris]

This is an old subject but with a new twist recently. It seems to be more important than ever to avoid having two pages about the same keyword than ever if you wish for both pages to rank. I'm looking at an established site right now that has been steady in serps for over 6 years that suddenly is not doing as well and many of the wrong pages are appearing for any given keyword(and much lower than the right page was ranked).

Almost 7 years ago a "similar articles" section was put in that had a thumbnail image and text link to similar pages. Suddenly, as of last week, pages with a "similar link" to any given page is ranking ahead of the actual article.

Again, one page ranking poorly because it is ranked for keyword(s) of a better page that would rank more highly isn't new. I'm just seeing a lot more of it this week. Pages with one mention of a keyword seem able to rank more highly than a page about that keyword on a site if the page containing just a link to the other page is also well ranked for something else. The problem with this is that the page will rank much worse than the desired page would and it completely blocks the desired page(not found at all when it's been eclipsed like this).

[nomis5]

The same has happened to some of my pages. I have an "index page" which shows a snippet and thumbnail for several connected pages which are linked to, those pages link back to the index page.

It irritated me so much the other day that when I wrote a new page, I did not link to it from the index page - that will happen in a year's time when the new page is established. I removed all the thumbnails and shortened the snippets.

I'm waiting three month's to see if that works.

[keyplyr]

Years ago I read an article about how significant it is not to compete against yourself, not to have one page targeting the same keyword searches as another of your pages.

I agree it appears to be more important lately. I've seen a couple pages drop from the SERP because another of my similar pages has better backlinks or just better overall quality.

The insite link text may play an important role here, as well as title, H1 tags and key phrases found in page content.

BTW I do link several main pages of my site from the index page as well as use short snippets of those pages on the index page, so far with no adverse effects.

[JS_Harris]

... and since a common trait among good pages is to be ranked for dozens or hundreds of keywords that becomes one tough challenge, not to compete with yourself. I just wanted to add that it seems links, or perhaps the "title" section of links(or both) are able to generate the behavior more than just plain text on a page. ie: if I link to page B from page A using a keyword suddenly page A is ranking in serps and not the receiving page(B).

A boost of internal link anchor text strength perhaps?

As a small experiment I removed a link on one page this was happening to and overnight the proper page jumped back into the serps, positioned at #4 again. The hijacking page ranked 42 before removing the link, not at all afterwards. Unrelated but the top 3 for this term are grandfathered and appear above the image section, the natural serps seem to start below the image section(and ads) so this is not a trivial problem to have.

I have to assume I have some weakness on the page/site but if a single internal link can convince Google that the page with the link is more important than the page receiving the link I'm not sure that anything I do would solve the problem. Add reciprocal internal links maybe?