Is a link from a search engine possible?
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When I Google a specific phrase on my website(Blog) (such as “Maria Mazzer’s sausage and chicken stew”, which is on my “Recipes” page) Google finds the correct link to my site (www.mazzolindicanti.com). But when I click on that, it takes me to the top of the Recipes page, not to that phrase itself. So the viewers (assuming they are knowledgeable enough and have time to waste) have to scroll down through the entire long page of recipes until they find that phrase/title. Is there any way to click on the “link” on Google and be taken right to the proper place on the page? (That seems to happen with Google searches of other websites.)
(This is a different question from my recent one about a search widget or my site. With that, I encountered the same problem, where the search would just lead to the top of the page, which was useless.)
Would all this work better if I switched to a different theme? (I’m now using Titan.)
Thanks. Ken
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi Ken,
When a search engine like Google links to a page on your site, clicking on that link will take you to the top of the page. Since your Recipes page has quite a bit of content, my recommendation would be to split up that content onto separate pages. For example, you could create a separate page for just the Soups and Stews — or even a separate page for each soup/stew recipe. That way, someone who ends up on that page would only see recipe they are looking for, instead of having to scroll down to the right place on the Recipes page.
Since you already have a Contents – Recipes page, you could use that page to link to each of the different recipes on your site. Let me know if you have any questions about that! :)
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Rachel, Thanks so much for the quick reply.
However, I don’t think that your first suggestion is so feasible. I have dozens of recipes, so that would require dozens of pages. Even worse, with my main topic, lyrics to songs, there are about 200 of them. That would be so confusing for a viewer, and also would not allow a viewer to scroll from song to song, just out of curiosity/interest. (Even if I did a separate page for the “A” songs, “B” songs, etc., that would be 26 pages . . . )
As for your second point, I already do use the Contents-Recipes page to link to each of the different recipes on the site, through page jumps. (WordPress kindly taught me the coding to do that.)
I think a compromise solution, then, would be if, when clicking on the Google link, that would take you to the Contents-Recipes page, instead of the Recipes page. Then it would be easier to find the particular recipe on the much shorter “table of contents” and jump to the desired recipe without scrolling down through all the recipes. (Same for the lyrics pages.) Is there any way to do that?
Ken
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Hi Ken,
Unfortunately, we don’t have control over how Google chooses to index and link to your site. Google looks for the page that has that phrase on it and then links to that page, so visitors searching for a phrase will end up at the top of that page. We can’t force Google to link to a different page instead.
However, you could include the list of contents at the top of the Recipes page, as well as on the Contents-Recipes page. That way, a user who ends up at the top of the Recipes page would still have the links to jump to the desired recipe. How does that sound as a possible solution?
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