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My website is crawled and indexed by Google. However, one of my problem is that the indexed pages are sometimes not the right one.

For example, let's say that I have star wars video on my website, those videos falls under the Star Wars collection. Now, my problem is that if someone googles Star Wars, instead of showing my Star Wars collection page with all the star wars related videos, it simply indexes one of my star wars video, making the result much less relevant to the initial search.

Also, my sitemap is automatically generated with a script (considering the amount of content my site has, I have little choice but to do so...)

So I would like to know if someone here can tell me how to fix this kind of behavior ? This might be something quite simple, but I can't find this information... Everything that I search related to my problem seems to lead to problems that arise when changing URL...

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First off, you are dealing with a few things in your question. I will try and go through it for you in no particular order.

As far as sitemaps go, they have nothing to do with a pages or sites performance generally. It is just a way to tell Google what pages you have. Where sitemaps are necessary is when part of your site cannot be crawled by a search engine. The common cases for this is where it is impossible to link all of your pages effectively, your links cannot be crawled due to a JavaScript issue, your content or some of your content exists behind a paywall or login. Most of the time, Google only uses your sitemap to determine if they can crawl your site properly by auditing what they find against your sitemap. Nothing more.

You are confusing the query results within a SERP (search engine result page) with a page being indexed. These are two different things.

You can tell if a page is indexed specifically by using a site: query. Here is an example.

site:example.com/mysubject/mypage.html

If you find your page, then the page is indexed.

What you are experiencing is likely a page performance issue. When you make your star wars query, the page you see first is the page that performs for that query best. Google will only show one or two SERP links per SERP page for any site. It is possible that more than two are shown if a site is popular or if the query result set is limited or weak.

You can try:

site:example.com star wars

This should show you what pages on your site would normally be found using the star wars query.

Another thing you have to know is that the Internet is HUGE!! You are competing with a huge number of other pages and sites unless you have a very unique site topic with little or no competition. The odds of a site appearing on the first page is rather rare most of the time. Unless your sites search performance is stellar, it is very difficult to rank within the first few results. This is where investigating your competition comes into play.

There are plenty of very good SEO answers to questions on this site. You can use the SEO tag to sort through the more recent answers. Since SEO changes rapidly and knowledge changes rapidly, I recommend reading the more recent answers more than older answers. We have some real experts here. Really.

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  • Wow very nice answer, this enlighten quite a few concepts for me. I've done as you said to with the site: , everything seems to be indexed fine, however the video just appears before the tag page... I guess this is a much more complex issue than I thought and there's no straight answer as to how to fix this right? ;)
    – Dacramash
    Dec 15, 2015 at 13:11
  • @Dacramash Yeah. Now you are talking about plain 'ole SEO. One page performs better because... Who knows?? But you can at least look at the two pages for clues.
    – closetnoc
    Dec 15, 2015 at 16:18

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