Google Won’t & Can’t Manually Change HubSpot Weird Search Results

The other day, I spotted a conversation with Victor Pan, the head of Technical SEO at HubSpot and Danny Sullivan, the Search liaison at Google about how HubSpot’s home page is not the number one listing in Google Search for a query on HubSpot.

Instead, some of the internal HubSpot.com pages rank above the home page for some reason. Yesterday, an internal page ranked one, with the home page, along with other internal pages, under that main listing as Sitelinks. The next day, the home page was listed in the main results but in the third position under two other internal pages.

It is just weird but despite it being weird and likely not super helpful to searchers not to see the HubSpot home page listed number one in the Google search results for a search on HubSpot, Google won’t and can’t make manual changes to its search results.

Danny Sullivan from Google said “we can’t and wouldn’t make any change to an individual ranking.” “But we can look into an issue to see if there are general improvements,” he added, which means they can try to see where the algorithm went wrong and see how to improve the algorithm to fix this from happening here and in other places. Danny Sullivan did add that it “does surprise me to see an internal page leading above the sitelinks.”

Here are those conversations on Twitter:

I see, the home page is listed, just as a sitelink to your home page. I’ll pass along the feedback.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) May 10, 2022

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To be clear, we can’t and wouldn’t make any change to an individual ranking. But we can look into an issue to see if there are general improvements. Does surprise me to see an internal page leading above the sitelinks.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) May 10, 2022

Again, the other day, an internal page ranked one, with the home page, along with other internal pages, under that main listing as Sitelinks. The next day, it was straight out search results with the home page ranking in the third spot under internal pages:

Wonder when the home page will rank again in the number one spot…

Forum discussion at Twitter.