Homepage Domain not Ranking, only subpages is?
-
What do you think can be causing issues that my main homepage is not showing on search results for the main search terms, only my sub-pages are showing up like the reservations page.
ps. I did not get a manual penalty action email.
Thanks,
-
Thanks guys, I have fixed the problem. and got the Root Domain back on the search results. The issue was over optimization and unnatural anchor text link profile.
We really appreciate the community for all the response.
-
Hi there,
You have two good answers here already from Andy and Dennis. If possible, could you provide examples of the site and the terms for which the internal pages are ranking? Feel free to PM them to me if you would rather they not appear on the thread. This should help me look at whether the internal pages are just more relevant to the queries, or whether it's truly strange that the home page doesn't rank.
Cheers,
Jane
-
Like Andy said, it's hard to really say without seeing it.
From my experience, it's usually just one of these:
1. The sub page is more relevant since your internal linking structure dictates that it is relevant to that keyword (plus your brand authority helps that page, even without links)
2. Something went wrong somewhere, in HTML problems, redirects and of course, overoptimised links (like a lot of domains with blogrolls pointing to the homepage) innocent looking links but they sometimes cause problems.
-
Thanks for the Respond,
The Root Domain/ Homepage was ranking for the the main search term until Feb 9th, then after that the Sub Page was only ranking for the same search term.
1. There is no duplicate titles or pages.
2. The Homepage is indexed, as it still ranking for other search terms, and I also search in google site:www.mysite.com
and still there.
3. There are no canonical issues. everything is Redirect to the Https, and the Https was ranking as for couple months until Feb 9,
4. No duplicated through index.html, default.html
5. 70% of the links are point to the Homepage.
6. Our Anchor Text distribution has only branded keywords, city name and the website, there is no commercial keywords.Thanks
-
There are so many possibilities for this.
Is the content on your sub pages, better matched to the search terms? Does the homepage say more about what you do in a generic way, or is it very targeted?
Do you have duplicate page Titles, or ones that are very similar? This can lead to keyword duplication (cannibalisation).
Is the homepage indexed by Google? It isn't excluded through the Robots file? Are there good links leading through to the sub pages, but the homepage is missing out?
Are there any canonical issues, or does your homepage get duplicated through index.html, default.html, etc.?
Sorry if these are vague, but there really are so many possibilities, it would be hard to guess without seeing it.
-Andy
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
-
Home Page and ranking
I have a problem and i have a question on that. Many important keywords and long tail keywords are ranking with the home page url.
Technical SEO | | mazzamz
How can i enrich the home page content without having a bad result and should i try to make the google spider send to more specific page?0 -
Changed domains, saw significant drop in domain authority
Hello, A little over a month ago we switched our domain from A to B. The original was .com and the new one is at a .tech for good measure. We have meticulously done 301 redirects page by page but there has been a massive drop in traffic and I checked here to see that we've gone from a 30 domain authority to a 9. The company is a few months over 1 year old, but we're really looking at traffic accumulated in just about 8 months for the old domain. Is there any way to recover some of the old juice in this one other than the re-directs? Our number of backlinks have also severely dropped despite re-directs.
Technical SEO | | SteveSaf0 -
Content on top-level-domain vs. content on subpage
Hello Seomoz community, I just built a new website, mainly for a single affiliate programm and it ranks really well at google. Unfortunately the merchant doesn’t like the name of my domain, that’s why I was thrown out of the affiliate program. So suppose the merchant is a computer monitor manufacturer and his name is “Digit”. The name of my domain is something like monitorsdigital.com at the moment. (It’s just an example, I don’t own this URL). The structure of my website is: 1 homepage with much content on it + a blog. The last 5 blog entries are displayed on the homepage. Because I got kicked out of the affiliate program I want to permanent redirect monitorsdigital.com to another domain. But what should the new website look like? I have two possibilities: Copy the whole monitorsdigital website to a new domain, called something like supermonitors.com. Integrate the monitorsdigital website into my existing website about different monitor manufacturers. E.g.: allmonitors.com/digit-monitors.html (that url is permitted by the merchant) What do you think is the better way? I just got the impression, that it seems to be a little easier to rank high with a top-level-domain (www.supermonitors.com) than with a subpage (www.allmonitors.com/digit-monitors.html). However the subpage can benefit from the domain authority, that was generated by other subpages. Thanks for your help and best regards MGMT
Technical SEO | | MGMT0 -
How to rank lower, fast....
Probably the complete opposite to all the questions asked on here before hehe One of my online stores is ranking in Google at no2 for a service we used to offer but no longer do as we do not have the contract anymore.We need to derank the listing as fast as we can we do not offer this service now. Normally we could just get google to deindex the page but it's the homepage we are ranking. It is ranking due to a good collection of exact match backlinks on. Have been trying to get our page off the first page for a couple of months but it appears that we did too good a job of getting it up there...it's not moving! Anyone have a suggestion please on how we can get off page one asap for this keyword without deindexing the homepage for our store? note: the keyword in question has not appeared on the site for a couple of months, removing that has had no impact on the ranking Thanks
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl1 -
Good organic rankings but no shopping rankings
My site www.hair1direct.co.uk comes up well in the organic rankings but when I select shopping in Google it does appear. Why would this be? Thanks James
Technical SEO | | avecsys0 -
Using hyphenated sub-domains or non-hyphenated sub-domains? What is the question! I Any takers?
For our corporate business level domain, we are exploring using a hyphenated sub-domain foir a project. Something like www.go-figure.extreme.com I thought from a user perspective it seems cluttered. The domain length might also be an issue with the new Algorithm big G has launched in recent past. I know with past experience, hyphenated domains usually take longer to index, as they are used by spammers more frequently and can take longer to get out of the supplementary index. Our company site has over 90 million viewers / year, so our brand is well established and traffic isn't an issue. This is for a corporate level project and I didn't have the answer! Will this work? anyone have any experience testing this. Any thoughts will help! Thanks, Rob
Technical SEO | | RobMay0 -
Google shows the wrong domain for client's homepage
Whenever the homepage of my client's homepage appears in Google results, the search engine is not showing our URL as our domain, but instead a partner domain that is linking to us. (The correct title and meta description of our homepage is showing.) I believe this is caused by the partner website (with a much higher pank rank) linking to our homepage from their footer to a URL with it's own domain that 302 redirects to our homepage. Example: Link: http://www.partnerwebsite.com/?ad2203 302 redirects to: http://www.clientwebsite.com/?moreadtracking The simple fix would be for the client to ask for removal of the 302 hijacking link - but they are uncomfortable with this request since they had requested it prior, and their relationship is not the best. Is there any other way to fix this?
Technical SEO | | Conor_OShea_ETUS0
