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When you search for "one averee bay hotel", google returns the website's Rooms page (oneavereebayhotel.com/rooms/). I want Google to return the main URL only, without the "/rooms".
I've been fiddling with the webmaster tools, requested a removal of this index, and resubmitted the site again and again to Google but nothing seems to change.
I'm a complete beginner to SEO (I'm more of a PHP guy). Could you give me some pointers how I should begin fixing this or where I should look?
Thanks.
It's possible that your keywords, meta descriptions, titles, headlines, alt text, image names etc on the "rooms" page are better optimised for search engines than your index page. So google thinks that page is more relevant to the search term you are using.
It' worth going to check on those, and make sure that the rooms page has specific, relevant, and different, descriptions to your index page.
It also takes time for Google to crawl and update, I think in the area of 24-48 hours so don't expect instant results in Webmaster tools.
Also, it could literally take months before you see your page rankings changing.
Try removing the brand name "one averee bay hotel" from all link title attributes as it isn't needed as much as other tags and is seen as keyword stuffing. Link titles are used for sitelinks so simply having the page title instead of one averee bay hotel - [page name] could help you qualify for sitelinks when people search for your brand name. This would appease Google by ranking your homepage first and providing sitelinks to your other pages and also help you rank your homepage first.
For page title attributes, move the brand name to the end of the tag i.e. Rooms - One Averee Bay Hotel. This is an SEO 101 rule of thumb.
The reason Google is ranking this higher is because users searching for this term tend to immediately click to the rooms page.
Please do not request for this page to be deindexed simply because you do not want it outranking your homepage for this query. Deindexing a page should only be done if you never want that page to rank under any circumstances which this is not the case here.
