Getting the relevant pages to rank highest for their KW(s)

I have a website with 8000 pages - all well optimised (I think!). Google indexes them all but many of my pages do not appear anywhere (or extremely low down) on the search results pages. I have tried "site:url search phrase" This shows all my web pages Googleassociates with the search phrase. The results are very good - with all my web pages displayed in roughly the order I would expect ie -
with the most relevant pages first! The trouble is, when I type the same search phrase into Google but not using the "site:url" prefix, Google presents one of my LEAST RELEVANT pages. Because it is not a very relevant page, understandably it comes way down the results pages. Any idea why this might be? All suggestions welcome.

First question: how is your internal linking? Does every one of those pages get a direct link from at least 5 other pages? Better yet: do you have other sites linking to your inner pages?

Secondly: do you REALLY think that your 8000 pages are interesting enough to ALL be listed? Think long and hard: would Google see it as being in the best interest of their customers (= web searchers) to list each and every one of your pages?

Well I think the answer to this depends on two things

1) Your understanding of relevance

2) Keyword Targetting

Google will display what it thinks are the most relevant pages in order of relevance and it is pretty good at that.

If there is a page that is genuinely less relevant than others on your site the likely reason for it ranking over another more relevant page on your site for the same keyword search will be due to linking.
The less relevant page will have more relevant (ironically) links than the more relevant page.
Its strange to see hwo this situation could occur.

Maybe you can post some sample URLs and the keywor searches in question. This would give us a better pitcure.

Thankyou for the reply and the offer of help. Both are much appreciated. I am in the UK and searching for 'Burton Snowboard Jackets'. Google ranks us top of page 5 = position 41. This is the page google presents:BargainBoards dot co dot uk/pages/freeoffers.aspx
No wonder it comes 41st. It has little to do with 'Burton Snowboard Jackets'.
When I type into google' site:Bargainboards.co.uk Burton Snowboard Jackets' Google lists 7240 of our web pages. These 3 pages are all well optimised for this phrase so come top of the list:
1) Bargainboards dot co dot uk = our home page with about 500 external links and 280 internal links

2)Bargainboards dot co dot uk/CB/Ski_Jackets_Burton-(4)(5).aspx = our Burton snowboard/ski jackets page, with loads of links but none displayed in google webmaster tools. This may be because I changed the url recently to include keywords.

3) = our ski jackets page. Just click on 'ski jackets' in the main nav bar located in the left margin. This page has 10 extrernal anchor links - most using the pharse 'burton Snowboard Jackets' and 196 internal links

Google lists the page it chose as the most relevant in 7th place. It has 2 poor quality external links and 284 internal links.

Looking it over, there are a couple of things that could be causing this, and I would imagine that it is a combination of them.

The first is that on every page as a nice static seo-friendly link you have "free offers" and it's right next to your "home" link, it's occurance and positioning are going to make it look very important to a spider. On top of that it's only one click away from your front page, whereas every other page is several clicks down and you have to go through some dynamic pages.

The title of the page is not doing you any favours either, starting it with "SNOWBOARD Burton Snowboarding" is just adding to the problem, other pages may have all the keywords as a title (I wasn't going to dig that far, and your search breaks when you search for burton jackets and burton snowboard, something about SEOBrand), but they can't compete with the stuff in my first paragraph.

As an aside, your pages are HUGE and look quite spammy (enter your url in rankquest.com lynx view tool and take a look), the words burton, snowboard and jacket appear so frequently in all the pages I looked at it is going to obscure the pages actually selling jackets as the keywords are only mentioned maybe once or twice more.

The free offers page is 183k (26k less than one of your product pages chosen at random), I'm sure there is something you can do to thin that out significantly.

If it was me I would go for a different title on the free offers page as well as trying to reduce it's important somewhat. The biggest help to your site might be a dramatic slimming down of the code and overuse of keywords on unrelated pages, just use them on the pages that need them. You could probably get the free offers page down to 20k and have it very close to how it looks now.

I hope that helps.

Thank you very much indeed for your well made points. You certainly speak a lot of sense and I agree with all you say. We should certainly work on these areas but I am not convinced they are the route cause of this particular problem. I gave the 'Burton Snowboard Jackets' example. This phrase contains 3 very popular and common words (Burton is to snowboards as Kleenex is to tissues) so they do get used a lot across the website. We do, however, have the same problem for lots or products using much rarer words eg on a search in the UK for Wild Duck Birdy Snowboard (a rare item if ever there was one) we rank 7th. I am not complaining about coming 7th, the problem is that Google decided this was the most relevant page for that search:
Bargainboards dot co dot uk /P/Flow-BLISS-Pink-Snowboard(5607).aspx - with 0 external, 14 internal links
The only place 'wild duck birdy' appears on this page is right at the bottom - in amongst a set of 'similar products' links I set up to try to help with this SEO problem. (in fact this link is no longer there but it appears in the cache)

Typing 'Site:bargainboards.co.uk wild duck birdy' shows that Google has several more relevant pages it could have presented. Top of the list comes our page listing all wild duck products:
Bargainboards dot co dot uk
/B/Wild_Duck_Snowboards_snowboard_wild duck_buy_cheap_sale-(17).aspx 0 external, 272 internal links
Next comes one of our pages listing an actual wild duck snowboard
/P/Wild-Duck-BIRDY-Snowboard(2889).aspx 0 external and 0 internal links

I presume these 2 pages are listed 1st and 2nd because they are the most relevant for this search phrase - which makes perfect sense to me. Why then, when you actually do a Google search does Google decide not to present these pages and to present a much less relevant page which Google itself has positioned 10th most relevant when doing the site: test?

In attempting to answer my own question, I can see that for some bizarre reason webmaster tools says we have no internal links to the second page. We have several and the page is in our sitemap too so I do not know why this should be?

Doing exactly the same exercises on another rare phrases "Demon White Snowboard Leash' shows we rank 3rd - simply because it is a very rare product but, as is often the case, Google presents an obscure page:
/P/Flow-Pro-11-FR-Snowboard-Bindings(1749).aspx
According to webmaster tools, this page has no external or internal links.
Running a cache on the page shows that it was picked up because this leash was featured at the bottom of this web page as a 'customers also bought' product. This feature is dynamic so the leash is no longer even shown on this page.

The site: test shows Demon rates this page as the most relevant:
/P/Demon-WHITE-Snowboard-Leash(6289).aspx

This is exactly what I would expect because it is the most relevant but Google does not present it! OK, I just checked and discovered for some bizarre reason Google has not identified any internal links to this page either - could I have partly answered my own question? If so, why does the site:test still show this page as the most relevant?

Use your google sitemap with the parameter "priority" to tell Google which pages are more important. Afterwards check that your internal links follow the same structure than the Google sitemap

You should ditch using google for link checking, and switch to something like the yahoo site explorer (I can send you the link if you need it but it's quite easy to find), google won't show you the real link data.

As for the links on your pages a lot of your problem may be down to the way many of your links are constructed, for instance this:

a href="/S/Snowboards_Snowboard_165_166_167_168_169_170_172_l arge_big_173-(25).aspx"

is nice, static and SEO friendly, whereas on the next line you have this:

a href='#' onclick="location.href='/ProductList.aspx?SubCat=25&Brand=85';" class='ptr'

which is significantly less so, it's a dynamic link which is never great, but it's also a java onclick event, which (from what I have read) google may cache but not necessarily pass on linkjuice. So those links could be missing out due to the way in which they are constructed.

Google may be largely ignoring the pages that it has to go through the javascript links to reach.

More helpful feedback thankyou. I will look into all these points.

We do have the priorities set on the sitemap but I will look at this again.

I realise Google is no good for link checking because it only shows you a small selection of the links. I was, however, checking the links from with Google webmaster tools. I was not aware that this was not reliable. Are you sure or were you just referring to the normal Google link check?

I am very interested in exploring your link juice theory some more. Anyone else got a view on this?

Just typed 'wild duck birdy' into google again and this XXXing forum now ranks higher than us after just a few hours of the entry being posted!

I'd be interested to know as well, as the information I am basing this on is quite old. Second opinions welcome.

As for the webmaster's tools, that's a good point, I appear to be getting different results between that and yahoo site explorer, but at the moment it's playing up so I can't give a definitive response.

Hey, we did that to try and control the relevancy problem. We wanted to present the first link to google as a page we wanted spidered and ranked but the second page was just a different way of looking at the first page, so we didnt want google to spider or present that page really. Thats why we didnt give it a static title and hid it behind a javascript rather than a natural link.

I think a simple nofollow would have done that if they dynamic link had not already done so. That might actually be the answer, if you want google to choose a different page just nofollow the free offers (not a bad idea as a matter of course across most of the links in that top bar). Additionally out of the three inlinks to "free offers" two of them are from a page about burton, and have burton in the link text, which may be the reason it's being picked.

Okay I have something more solid for you, your top ranked competitors all have static pages cataloging burton clothing specifically their titles are all pretty good and the on page wording is quite good as well.

Your site doesn't appear (I couldn't find one, but it's a big site) to have a simple burton jackets or burton clothing page, you have burton as a brand but that involves all the other products they have. Also the text before the products does not contain the word jacket, it has clothing, but that's not what the search is for.

If you created a static linked optimised page along the lines of: manufacturer + specific product I imagine that you'd be back near the top quite quickly.

Also if you intend to keep the java links I would very strongly encourage you to move them all into a separate java file. They are really bulking up the page, and google may penalise you for the loading times as a result. If it was me I would bin them and find an alternative, 180k for a page is big.

Hi,

Assigning a "priority" to urls in your sitemap will have no bearing on rankings; Google determines relevance on it's own, the sitemap priority settings are just a suggested guide for spidering.

If you have pages which you do not wish to be returned in searches, use the "noindex, follow" (robots) metatag - that way Google will follow links through the pages but not include them in it's index.

If you have pages which you wish surfers to see often (eg: special offers) but you don't want Google to assign too much importance to them, use "nofollow" in the links (and - if you wish - just allow a "follow" from one or two pages).

Use "nofollow" rather than java links (for reduced page size) and always "standardize" on a single url for every link to any page (I would consider using Mod_Rewrite to make your urls ultra-SE-friendly).

Try to reduce page sizes and don't needlessly repeat KW phrases on your "targetting page"; try to use different combinations of each of your KW's with other (related) words/phrases, thus offering a wider variety of related information and capturing many more KW combo's, as well as not getting penalised for spamming your main one(s).

Thanks everyone for all your contributions. You have given lots of ideas on how to tidy up the website and improve SEO in general, which I have taken on-board, but I am afraid I am still totally flummoxed about my original question. We do extremely well in the Google rankings for many, many phrases. From this I conclude that our approach to SEO must be reasonably OK. My issue still remains that, for many other phrases, Google seems to recognise our most relevant pages but chooses to present one of our least relevant pages in it's search results. In fact, for many of these 'problem' phrases, we formerly ranked 1st and Google was presenting appropriate pages. I am not aware of any 'dodgy' or even 'risky' SEO activity but I do get the impression that Google is penalising us in some way. They have not banned us (far from it) but - perhaps because we are doing so well for so many other pages - it does appear as though Google may have programmed itself to deliberately make us underperform on a bunch of phases so we do not dominate our sector. Could this be the case? Has anyone heard of this happening before?