Google placement of pages with similar permalinks

Hello,

How does Google place pages from the same website with similar page titles(permalinks). I noticed that few of my important pages, did not come up in the search mainly because, I found another page with similar title showing up(quite irrelevant however).

I guess I have written it long ago but I just recently noticed the similarity in permalinks. I requested a deletion with Google's Webmasters and all worked out fine.

My question is how does Google determined which one to show. It kind of picked up the non related one, with the more irrelevant keywords and title, but it was the oldest.

Not sure if I explained it well but here is an example:

Page 1, created 2009 with link: http://example.com/hello-world-i-am-back/
Page 2, created 2011 with link: http://example.com/hello-world/

Regards,

Quote:

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Originally Posted by xecutable

Hello,

How does Google place pages from the same website with similar page titles(permalinks). I noticed that few of my important pages, did not come up in the search mainly because, I found another page with similar title showing up(quite irrelevant however).

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The URI of a page is only one of many factors influencing SERP position.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by xecutable

My question is how does Google determined which one to show. It kind of picked up the non related one, with the more irrelevant keywords and title, but it was the oldest.

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may factors may be at play. on-page content on the second article could be more semantically related to the users' search, it could have more inbounds, internal linking may point more link equity to the 2nd page. Perhaps original page is nested deep within your site, 6 hops from the homepage, whereas the newer page is closer to the root of your site (root usually having more "juice" to pass to internal pages)

some food for thought - hard to answer your Q without actually seeing your site, linking structure, page content and link metrics for both pages. The permalink/URI is not as important as you might think it is.

I see.

I thought that it only picked up the permalink.

Thanks for shedding a light on this topic.

Search engines often give preference to older pages and sites, so no wonder that an older page with a similar title used to do better.