I am currently experiencing weird ranking fluctuations with google for some of my pages.
The scenario is the following:
- There are landingpages like
www.example.com/topic/destination
- There are product pages like
www.example.com/topic/destination/0000-product-slug
The main keyword for the landingpages where they should rank for is topic destination
in any case. However for some of them the position and indexed page in google are fluctuating daily. The average position for the landingpage is between 8 and 10 while the position for the product page ranking for topic destination
is something in between 30 and 50. They never rank the same time, so when the product page ranks the Top10 ranking is gone.
I already read this can be caused by canibalization between the landingpage and the product page. However the keywords do not even occur (besides breadcrumbs) on the product pages and all content is unique.
The question is: is there any major ranking factor besides content for a page to rank for a specific keyword? Do (landing)pages that are optimized for a specific keyword inherit their ranking for internally linked product pages and should I remove those links then or set them on nofollow?
Additional info: there are no major technical issues for the affected pages according to seobility onpage analysis. WDF*IDF analysis for the keyword is also fine (no score for product page and good score for landingpage).
Example for a fluctuating ranking (Top10 is always landingpage, lower always product page):