3 replies to this topic

[PCPlod]

Hi, from google analytics I can see that one of the pages on our website – just an ordinary page – gets the majority of the traffic to our website, which is completely unexpected. Looking at the SEO analytics, the page has a great average position in searches relating to the subject matter of the page. This is what gets all the traffic to the page. No other pages have similar average positions for popular search terms.

What I want to know is whether I can find out why google gives that specific page such good average positions. There’s nothing obviously different about the page compared to others, in terms of links from other sites, content quality, updating frequency etc. Thanks in advance!

[chrishirst]

Because Google's algo has determined that page is the best one for their users query.

I

There’s nothing obviously different about the page compared to others, in terms of links from other sites, content quality, updating frequency etc

Only in your opinion, obviously Google "thinks" differently.

And of course the reason why YOU think it is "unexpected" is quite probably the exact same reason why Google "thinks" it is the right URL to display.

[PCPlod]

Thanks for the reply, I think I have an idea why google likes it. It's a page about a medication which is off-licence for the purpose that the article is about. As a result, the official sources of info for drugs which people would normally visit don't have info on it for this use. So I think that we're providing info that the other usual main players don't.

I didn't think this could be the case, but thinking about why google ranks pages highly, to give people what they're searching for, this would make sense. So it probably is the right page to display, because a lot of people searching for the drug want info on it for the unlicensed use.

[chrishirst]

Which makes it exactly what Google want to show their users, unique content that users want to read.

There are probably some genuinely natural links to that URL and as Google never shows all the links they know about, and are more likely to show you ones that do not count or are the least "valuable" ones, you simply never know they are there.