Internal Link Keyword Curse

[timemachined]

How do you beat this curse?

Scenario: There's a page that is all about blue widgets. But elsewhere you have a link to that page that reads 'blue widgets' The page with the link on, rather than the page about blue widgets gets ranked. And usually lower down than the actual page would be.

Seriously, how can this be beaten as G is really rather thick in the head to keep doing this. Or I am for not realising why the site is being penalised. Why on earth does G keep ranking the page the linked keyword is on, rather than the actual page with 600 to 1000 words of text, keyword phrases, associated synonyms and other information.

The correct page would be 8th to 15th position, but because ranks the 'linked from' page, it ranks lower at 25th to 30th. Why? I've had this problem for ages. It makes no sense.

[keyplyr]

Stop competing against yourself. You have control of your own content.

• Put more content about "blue widgets" on the target page.

• Reduce the amount of content about "blue widgets" on the linking page.

• Change the link text to something other than "blue widgets."

• Likewise adjust your meta data

• Use GSC and resubmit

[timemachined]

I got frustrated and posted this and G actually worked and provided a great article to MOZ from 2016. So I've just spent the last few hours going through and adding keyword to on page bookmark link and keyword in a outbound link on the target pages. Not so sure about outbound phrasing... so will see what that does.

Unfortunately I can't change the keyword in links on the pages the keywords rank lower for, because they are title links. The under performing wrongly lower ranked page seriously just includes the link and title text, this is what gets me so annoyed.

Perhaps it's because G can't figure out what that page is for, in this instance the homepage, so ranks the page for every keyword but lower down for term and does so because has higher juice rating. So a solution might be to put 1000 words about the site's main theme on the homepage so it doesn't rank for all the individual one phrase links.

I will do that now and cross fingers. This is a long term problem, I had to removed related articles as pages would rank all over the shop for the wrong terms and because of single mentions. In the main you would think the 700 to 1000 words and keyword phrase ratio, the metas, the images with title, associated synonyms, the h2, h3 and strong would stem this problem but it appeals not to. Unfortunately I am only human and while I can instantly tell the difference, G is much more clever in suggesting it cannot.

[LarryB]

Check your link profile - do you have links with anchor text related to blue widgets going to the wrong page and not to the actula "blue widgets" page?

[keyplyr]

Unfortunately I can't change the keyword in links on the pages the keywords rank lower for, because they are title links.

You should consider varying the text here and there. Don't duplicate title text exactly in the inter-page links. Be more natural.

[hnkankaria]

I totally agree with @keyplyr for:

Stop competing against yourself. You have control of your own content.

• Put more content about "blue widgets" on the target page.

• Reduce the amount of content about "blue widgets" on the linking page.

• Change the link text to something other than "blue widgets."

• Likewise adjust your meta data

• Use GSC and resubmit

Also, my suggestion is, start building more high quality links (whether dofollow or nofollow) around the long tail keywords related to blue widgets for that targeted page. Also, in other website pages as well, if you have anything related to "blue widgets" please put the internal links to the blue widgets targeted page.

Hope this helps.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:44 am (utc) on Oct 11, 2017]
[edit reason] Fixed formatting (added quote box) [/edit]

[timemachined]

I will try but should someone really have to do so much work when it is clearly Google that is broken. Why on earth does one sole link on a totally unrelated page get to index a page for the term?

I'm wondering if it's a website code problem, but why does a single h2 or h3 link or rel bookmark link rank a page for a term as opposed to a fully SEO'd page about the subject and keyphrase? It's broken.

Unfortunately Google is the only company in the world that doesn't have customer service so it's impossible to find out why. A page that has 1000 words of text, several mentions in title, strong, h1, h2, h3 and in outbound link and internal page bookmark link, and images, gets displaced by a single link elsewhere.

I tried putting a latest article widget back in the sidebar and it did it again, ranked an unrelated page for the keyword that was the latest article, and lower down, removing the targeted page from 5th, replacing it with unrelated and showing 38th. One link should not have that power. Google is ridiculous.

[hnkankaria]

Unfortunately Google is the only company in the world that doesn't have customer service so it's impossible to find out why.

True! I totally agree with you. But, the problem is, Google is not asking money from us to get the search results on the Page 1.

But, I must say, Google is always making efforts to only make search results better each day for the searchers because the searchers are his customers and not we. We are the promoters of our clients and business and not his customers. And, one more thing, Google is the only search engine that can ban a website if it is not meant to be ethically serving his clients. I guess this is what real customer service is.

[FranticFish]

This problem is not a new one - although the exact reasons people experience it might be different these days.

I had this problem myself 5 years ago, the old thread might help you here - [webmasterworld.com...]