Will be interesting to see the impact (presumably negative) on conversions if the homepage continues to be listed in place of the relevant inner page.

Is anyone else seeing a change in the listings ??

This post sparked a few conversations with industry friends and many also reported seeing the changes pre-December 20th. Piecing it together is seems to have been something of a phased roll-out (as many are), by sector. Interesting that you noticed a difference with single token keywords. In fact that’s really interesting… do you happen to recall any of the other single token queries?

One other point – this hasn’t rolled out in all sectors. Gaming serps don’t seem to have changed.

Especially for one word phrases such as beds.

But everything you have said I agree with totally.

I agree completely – this drives home the now critical importance of quality content on deeper pages, and improved site architecture. Topical focus separation, sub-navigation, breadcrumbs will all directly impact the results more than ever. And personally, I’m glad for it.

@Dan – it seems as if this update applies to sites that are in certain sectors where a certain quality can be inferred, and that the change applies an appended search after-the-fact, using site search. In which case it doesn’t seem that the URL is causal, but correlative i.e. the page on the site that contains most content about “product x” happens to be site.com/product-x

As mentioned above, informal conversations and intelligence swapping with others – tends to conclude that this seems to be very crude, and largely attributable to greatest number of mentions of KW per page [when site quality is already established.]

Can you share with me “a few changes to the optimisation have been made”… etc. If not here then perhaps by DM and let’s see what we can put together.
It would be my guess that you changed the on-page content quite heavily, possibly using synonyms/antonyms as opposed to exact KW on the usurping page???

In the first client, they rank on the first page for a competitive term and their homepage has been replaced with the relevant sub-page which is fantastic for conversions or at least appears so with the little data available.

However, they are the only site on the 1st page where Google is listing the sub-page as opposed to the homepage which seems strange as many of the other sites are totally themed around this specific keyword.

Any thoughts ??

In the second client, an inner page had replaced the homepage for their main keyword, however it was not the ideal landing page as the site structure meant that Google had picked a specific product, rather than say a category landing page which in theory is ‘more’ relevant’ to the user.

A few changes to the optimisation have been made with the intention of trying to steer Google to the page we would ideally like to see appear in the Google. In a short space of time, Google has already recognised the changes and the client now has the ‘correct’ page ranking.

It will also be interesting to see if Google can distinguish between quality content pages and Blog pages, more-so for the company / organisation whose website it is. I guess a good internal linking structure can overcome this?