PR of homepage when other pages have more lniks
-
This is going to sound like such a newbie question. I don't know how I've been doing SEO all this time and haven't come across the answer.
It's usually true that a homepage will have the most backlinks, but what if it doesn't? What if an internal page has more links? Is it possible for an internal page to have a higher PR than a homepage?
Additionally, if I do on-page SEO for many internal pages of my site, will it only help those particular pages or will it give the whole site a boost, thus making the homepage rank higher in the SERPS?
-
Its not just from backlinks. I've got blogs where the homepage is PR1 but posts are PR3, due to social signals and shares of the post. This seems to be happening more recently.
-
No Panda problems. It's a legitimate business whose website I'm just trying to make as optimized as possible. www.stadriemblems.com
Most of our product pages only have about a paragraph of text in them like this one. I was hoping by adding five or six paragraphs of helpful information to all of those pages like this one that Google would consider the whole site more helpful rather than only the page.
I mean, individual pages have to count in some way toward the quality of the overall site in Google's eyes. I've always heard that it's a good thing to have a lot of indexed pages--as long as they're good. So if it's only individual pages that matter, then what's the difference between a site that has 1,000 quality pages vs. a two page site as far as home page ranking goes?
Is having 1,000 indexed pages only a good thing because you have 1,000 chances to rank for 1,000 different terms, and has no bearing on the homepage?
-
Great points Doug.
-
If those pages you write attract their own inbound links then the link-juice that flows into your site, into those pages, will also flow to the other pages on your site giving other pages on your site a boost too.
Don't just think of link juice as something that flows down from your home page.
Adding more (quality) content will also help your website rank for all those lovely long-tail keywords.
Just remember that it's not JUST about links/link-juice. The pages should have a purpose and be written for the audience you're targeting. Make sure you're thinking about answering their questions rather than your own, and provide them with the information they need.
-
Ingeneral (I have not seen your site or know what problems it might have), if your site was hit by panda then adding great content to all your pages would probably help your homepage rank better for your targeted keywords. However, I don't know if you are having a panda problem or just need to do more link building to your homepage and optimize it. A panda penalty can reduce the rankings of all the pages on a site.
Also, adding quality content that helps the user is never the wrong choice to make. However, if you are trying to get your homepage ranking better for a specific phrase and you don't have penalties/filters on the page. Then I would probably focus on link building and doing on page SEO for that page and funneling the link juice from the other high PR pages on the site to my homepage more efficiently.
I hope this helps.
Thanks,
Jason
-
So if I devote a lot of time to adding a lot of quality content to my site--lots of text and helpful information about our products, Google doesn't view the site in general as better and more informative, thus ranking the home page higher? All that extra text helps is just the page it's on?
-
Marisa,
Yes, it is possible for an internal page to have higher PR than the hompage. Sometimes a site will host a viral piece of content (infographic, quiz or an awesome blog post etc..) that will dramatically increase that pages PR. This is not a bad thing, but can be a very good asset.
On to your last question, depending on how you have your internal link structured the link juice coming into the site will help all your pages rank more aggressively in the SERPs. ingeneral onpage SEO will only help the page that you are optimizing ranking more aggressively. However, if you are optimizing your internal links to other pages, this will help those pages rank better too. So in short, it depends on what you are doing. If you are just optimizing the Title tag, meta description, H1 tag and keywords on the page. You are really only helping that page rank better. However, if you are linking to other pages from within the body copy and optimizing your internal links to pass more juice. That will help all your pages rank better.
Remember that google doesn't rank site, it ranks pages.
I hope this helps.
Thanks,
Jason
-
All those deep pages that have lots of back links also pass on page rank via their links too and I bet that in most cases pages on a website have one or more links back to the homepage...
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
-
Why is my inner pages ranking higher than main page?
Hi everyone, for some reason lately i have discovered that Google is ranking my inner pages higher than the main subfolder page. www.domain.com/subfolder --> Target page to be ranked
Technical SEO | | davidboh
www.domain.com/subfolder/aboutus ---> page that is currently ranking Also in the SERP most of the time, it is showing both links in this manner. www.domain.com/subfolder/aboutus
-----------www.domain.com/subfolder Thanks in advance.1 -
Old Content Pages
Hello we run a large sports website. Since 2009 we have been doing game previews for most games every day for all the major sports..IE NFL, CFB, NBA, MLB etc.. Most of these previews generate traffic for 1-2 days leading up to or day of the event. After that there is minimal if any traffic and over the years almost nothing to the old previews. If you do a search for any of these each time the same matchup happens Google will update its rankings and filter out any old matchups/previews with new ones. So our question is what would you do with all this old content? Is it worth just keeping? Google Indexes a majority of it? Should we prune some of the old articles? The other option we thought of and its not really practical is to create event pages where we reuse a post each time the teams meet but if there was some sort of benefit we could do it.
Technical SEO | | dueces0 -
Homepage indexation issue
Hello all, I've been scratching my head about this one for a while now... Let me explain the situation. I'm working on a multi-lingual website. Visitors are redirected (301) when they visit the homepage to the correct domain.com/en/default.html, domain.com/nl/default.html, domain.com/fr/default.html or domain.com/de/default.html based on browser language. I have doubts about the impact on the ability for Google to index the website because of that, but that's a problem for another day. The problem I'm having right now, is that domain.com/nl/default.html, domain.com/de/default.html and domain.com/fr/default.html are all indexed. When I search for the URL in Google I get the correct page on number one so I'm pretty sure those are indexed correctly. When I search for domain/en/default.html though, the homepage appears without /en/default.html extension. Does this mean Google assumes the domain.com page is the same as domain.com/en/default.html even though the redirect that's in place? Would be great if someone could shed some light on this. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | buiserik0 -
From page 1th to page 18th @ Google
Hello Mozzers! I have a question, you may help.. How may it be possible that a page ranking well (1th result) goes from 1th result to the 18th page just in 1 day? It doesnt seem to be any kind of penalization.. I now had all suspicious outgoing links to be nofollow (they were not before), this may be a cause .. (?) Do you have any other suggestion? Thanks
Technical SEO | | socialengaged0 -
Local City Pages
Anyone have any input on the tactics being used for a national company trying to target local city pages. For instance, you might be a national printing company and you are trying to compete against local printers in cities by creating a specific page for that city + print keywords.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
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 -
Wordpress Archive pages
In the SEOMOZ site report a number of errors were found. One of which was no or duplicate meta desctions on certain blog pages. When I drilled down to find these i noticed thosepages are the wordpress autocreated archive pages. When I searched for these through the wordpress control panel through both pages and blogs they were nowhere to be found. Does anyone know how to find these pages or are they not something I need to worry about?
Technical SEO | | laserclinics0 -
Duplicate pages
Hi Can anyone tell me why SEO MOZ thinks these paes are duplicates when they're clearly not? Thanks very much Kate http://www.katetooncopywriter.com.au/how-to-be-a-freelance-copywriter/picture-1-58/ http://www.katetooncopywriter.com.au/portfolio/clients/other/ http://www.katetooncopywriter.com.au/portfolio/clients/travel/ http://www.katetooncopywriter.com.au/webservices/what-i-do/blog-copywriter/
Technical SEO | | ToonyWoony0