The nonprofit I look after puts public domain texts online. Plain block editor, no builder, nothing clever. Almost all of their search traffic is people hunting for free ebook project gutenberg, and that is not what the site is, so the bounce rate is what you would expect.
Tried three things: 1. rewrote the h1 and title tag so the collection name comes first, 2. added an intro paragraph saying plainly what the site is and is not, 3. a canonical experiment I made a mess of and reverted the same day.
Positions barely moved. The pages match the words too well and Google does not care that the visitor is disappointed when they land.
The trustee sees the traffic line going up and thinks it is working. I see 92% of it gone inside five seconds. Has anyone shifted what a page ranks for without changing the URL?
Source: r/WPBuilders · by /u/bergstrom89