Homepage outranked by sub pages - reason for concern?
-
Hey All,
trying to figure out how concerned I should be about this. So here is the scoop, would appreciate your thoughts.
We have several eCommerce websites that have been affected by Panda, do to content from manufacturers and lack of original content. We have been working hard to write our own descriptions and are seeing an increase in traffic again. We have also been writing blogs since February and are getting a lot of visits to them.
Here is the problem, our blog pages are now outranking our homepage when you type in site:domain-name
Is this a problem? our home page does not show up until you are 3 pages in. However when you type in just our domain name in google as a search it does show up in position one with sitelinks under it.
This is happening across both of our sites. Is this a cause for concern or just natural due to our blogs being more popular than our homepage.
Thanks!
Josh
-
Is your blog hosted on a subdomain?
Personally I have noticed that Panda is sitewide but the subdomains might remain unaffected. In our case, our ecommerce site with 6,000+ pages got affected but the blog (subdomain) actually increased in traffic due to better content, more social signals and other factors.
-
Thanks for the response. It is nice to hear from someone else who has the same type of site and sees the same thing. Appreciate the tip and the response.
-
I would be concerned if the home page didn't appear, but I'm not sure whether it matters that it is getting outranked by blog pages. We have eCommerce sites and added blogs to a couple of them around February. Most of the time the blogs seem to support the rankings of the pages they are written to funnel traffic towards, but sometimes they will outrank them. Google seems to love the fresh content, but when blogs outrank other more relevant pages I find there is usually an issue with on-page optimisation.
-
Please take the time to read this page, it has a calculator you can play with also, it will make things clearer I'm sure
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html -
Hi Joshua.
There is no concern at all with internal pages outranking your home page. It can be perfectly natural.
Let's say you have a site about...well, almost anything. Today you perform an interview with the President and talk about...well, almost anything. You publish that interview on your site. Overnight that interview will probably attract thousands of links causing that page to be the most linked page on your site. There is nothing wrong with that result.
You can try to sculpt your PR within your site a bit. You can say hey, I have a ton of PR on this one page and I want to move some of it to my latest or most profitable products. In that case, you can add a sidebar to the page with "latest products" or "featured products". You may also be able to sneak in a few anchor text links within the content itself depending on how the interview progressed.
A video which may help: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qigo05nAqKw
-
Thanks Alan,
that helps and you might have pointed something there. Our site has lots of links on each page and each page basically links to the same pages which would keep everything pretty even. Structure is something that we are working on. I wonder if that is part of the problem.
-
When searching for site:mydomain.com i also asume that it is in order of rank, but i cant say i know that for a fact.
I would look at my internal linking
do all pages link back to home page, do they liink back to mydomain.com recommended or mydomain.com/default.htm
do you have a full sitemap on every page, I recommend not.
If every page links to every other page, this keeps link juice even on every page, when really you want to give your home page or landing pages prominence.
The best structure is flat, home page links to every page, and every page links back to home page and landing pages if you have them.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Canonical Page Question
Hi, I have a question relation to Canonical pages That i need clearing up. I am not sure that my bigcommere website is correctly configured and just wanted clarification from someone in the know. Take this page for example https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/ Canonical link is https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/ The Rel="next" link is https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/?sort=bestselling&page=2 and this page has a canonical tag as rel='canonical' href='https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/?page=2' /> Is this correct as above and working as it should or should the canonical tag for the second (pagination page) https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/?page=2 in our source code be saying rel='canonical' href='https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/' />
Technical SEO | | oceanstorm0 -
Duplicate page titles for blog snippets pages
I can't figure the answer to this issue, on my blog I have a number of pages which each show snippets and an image for each blog entry, these are called /recent-weddings/page/1 /2 /3 and so on. I'm getting duplicate page titles for these but can't find anywhere on Wordpress to set a unique title for them. So http://www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/recent-weddings/…/2/ has the same title as http://www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/recent-weddings/…/3/
Technical SEO | | simonatkinsphoto0 -
Pages Not Getting Indexed
Hey there I have a website with pretty much 3-4 pages. All of them had a canonical pointing to one page and the same content ( which happened by mistake ) I removed the canonical URL and added one pointing to its page. Also, I added the original content that was supposed to be there to begin with. It's been weeks but those pages are not getting indexed on the SERPS while the one that they use to point with the canonical does.
Technical SEO | | AngelosS0 -
Pages not being indexed
Hi Moz community! We have a client for whom some of their pages are not ranking at all, although they do seem to be indexed by Google. They are in the real estate sector and this is an example of one: http://www.myhome.ie/residential/brochure/102-iveagh-gardens-crumlin-dublin-12/2289087 In the example above if you search for "102 iveagh gardens crumlin" on Google then they do not rank for that exact URL above - it's a similar one. And this page has been live for quite some time. Anyone got any thoughts on what might be at play here? Kind regards. Gavin
Technical SEO | | IrishTimes0 -
Old Product Pages
Hi Issue: I have old versions of a product page in the Google index for a product that I still carry. Why: The URLs were changed when we updated this product page a few years ago. There are four different URLs for this product -- no duplicate content issues b/c we updated the product info, Title tags, etc. So I have a few pages indexed by Google for a particular product. Including a current, up-to-date page. The old pages don't get any traffic, but if I type in google search: "product name" site:store.com then all of the versions of this page appear. The old pages don't have any links to them, only one has any PA, and as I said they don't get any traffic, and the current page is around #8 in google for its keyword. Question: Do these old pages need 301 redirects, should I ask google to remove the old URLs? It seems like Google picks the right version of this page for this keyword query, is it possible that the existence of these other pages (that are not nearly as optimized for the keyword) drag it down a bit in the results? Thanks in advance for any help
Technical SEO | | IOSC0 -
Why are pages linked with URL parameters showing up as separate pages with duplicate content?
Only one page exists . . . Yet I link to the page with different URL parameters for tracking purposes and for some reason it is showing up as a separate page with duplicate content . . . Help? rpcIZ.png
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Sub pages Vs subdomain Pagerank flow.
I Have Question about Pagerank flow:
Technical SEO | | tommytai
If ihave a site :domain.com and i have 2 solutions like:
Solution #1: Quote: | domain.com/blog and domain.com/video if i try to do :
Root domain only link to
domain.com/video and
domain.com/blog | Solution #2: Quote: | Root domain only link to
video.domain.com and
blog.domain.com | So <acronym title="Google PageRank">Pr</acronym> domain.com/blog = <acronym title="Google PageRank">Pr</acronym> blog.domain.com ?
and <acronym title="Google PageRank">PR</acronym> domain.com/video = <acronym title="Google PageRank">Pr</acronym> video.domain.com ? And don't know why a subdomain of blogspot or Wordpress ranking easier than a new domain like:keyword.wordpress.com and keyword.com So What Wordpress pass to keyword.wordpress.com ?0 -
Minimum # of words on a homepage?
When I design sites for clients I try to keep the homepage clean and simple. As a result, I usually end up with very little actual content. For SEO purposes. What is the minimum # of words that I should have on any given homepage to avoid being penalized by Google? Does it have to be at least 150 or something like that? Even though my internal pages have plenty? thanks, Martin
Technical SEO | | RogersSEO0