Getting main topic content to rank in a topic after other subtopic content is already ranking?

[bernard]

I've published a bunch of content around a topic, going for topical relevance.

I began with publishing the subtopics, planning on publishing the main topic later, because it would be easier to understand what would go there then.

I posted a main topic article in late May and linked it from all the subtopics and in return linked to all the subtopics.

The issue is that 1.5 months in, it's still a subtopic that is ranking for that main topic query, and because the subtopic can never be completely relevant, it is stuck in the 10-15th range.

Could be I am just impatient, but is this something you recognise? That you should probably publish the main topic content first, to avoid the subtopic cannabalising it?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Could be I am just impatient, but is this something you recognise? That you should probably publish the main topic content first, to avoid the subtopic cannabalising it?

I do tend to start "at the top" with the main topic and then work my way down, but not for any other reason than it makes more sense for my brain and I feel like users expect to see the bigger topics populated on the site, so I want them there early.

But yes, I've seen this a bunch. The solution for me has always been:

1. De-optimize the sub-topic page for the main keyword as much as you can, including looking at the internal anchors pointing to that page.
2. Build more external links to the main page, carefully crafting a few targeted anchors (and no more) to make it abundantly clear it's meant to rank for the main term. With the internal links pointing to this page, you can get aggressive with the anchor texts, in my opinion.
3. Time passes and Google sorts it out with the new data you're providing via the backlinks and re-optimizations.

A lot of times, when you can't do anything about the optimizations, it tends to come down to "which qualifying pages on this domain for this keyword have the most page rank and authority," which is why I'm always looking at links once the optimizations are taken care of.