Subpage ranking for homepage keyword
-
Hi all,
May seem like a simple scenario and I might be missing something, but my subpage seems to be ranking for my main homepage keyword.
The subpage PR is 28 and my domain authority is 17, how can I get my main home page to rank instead of the sub page (product page)?
I want to stay away from exact match anchor text links, any suggestions?
-
Hi Phillip,
Try using the On Page Optimization tool under "Search" in your Moz Analytics account to grade each page for the term. It could be that the internal page is better-targeted for the term, even though it's only loosely related.
It's also possible that the subpage has received a high number of links from third parties, although this is fairly rare. There is no chance that the home page is under any sort of filter or penalty from backlink activity (e.g. too many anchors with the target term used as anchor text, pointing at the home page?). Although also not terribly common, Google has been known to penalise pages but not entire websites, based upon the page's backlinks.
You can also try linking to the home page from the subpage and including the target term in the link, but not linking to the subpage from the home page.
-
Hi Phillip
Thanks for your response.
My homepage is ranking no.1 when I do the site: search.
The home page is indexed, and yes sorry I mean PA, the sub page is loosely relevant.
-
Do you have competing title tags, headings, and content between this sub-page and the home page? If they are the same or similar, something on the home page makes it more appealing to rank than your home page. It could be better quality content that is more relevant to the keyword than the home page or it could signify issues with your home page as Philip alluded to.
Limited content or mixed content on the home page could be an issue or it may be technical. Is the home page not loading correctly or loading very slowly? Also, is your home page not ranking for they keyword or is the sub-page just higher in ranking? Does your home page rank for other keywords?
-
For some reason, Google has decided that the interior page is more relevant for the query. There's many reason this might happen...
Go to google.com and do a "site:" search for your domain. site:example.com -- Is your homepage ranking #1 on the SERP? If not, your homepage may not be indexed or might have a manual penalty imposed. Are you 100% sure the homepage is indexed? Do you have Webmaster Tools? Make sure everything is all square in there.
What do you mean by the subpage's PR is 28? Do you mean PA? Is this interior page very relevant for your main keyword or is it just sort of (loosely) relevant?
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
-
Sudden Rankings Drop for Good Keywords.. Did I Do This? Please Help :(
Hello, I noticed a gradual rankings drop for 3 important keywords over the last month, with a pretty big plummet the last two weeks. Overall in the last month+ we dropped from position 9 to 41.I noticed this when I dug further after noticing traffic dropping since February (not a drastic traffic drop). I should note that the keywords took people to my client's homepage. Their branded keywords have no suffered and I looked at a couple others that haven't either. Now, there is a link in the site footer (we have site wide header and footer) that takes you to a static page that contains links for the 2 digital flipbook catalogs the customer has (one for US and one for Canada). My concern is that at the end of January I had a developer implement a noindex/nofollow meta robot & robots.txt disallow specifically on the HTML pages/URL of the Canadian catalog ONLY. It specifically pointed to that flipbook URL. This catalog is nearly identical to the US catalog and I thought I'd be eliminating duplicate content and helping with crawl budget. After looking further into it last week (reading up about internal nofollows not necessarily being detrimental, but not recommended) and noticing the drop in search visibility traffic (starting gradually in March), I had the disallow/nofollow removed. This was last week, and over this last week the traffic took an even bigger drop (not amazingly drastic but enough to be concerned) and I noticed the keywords that we did ok for dropped even more this last week (down to 41). I'm concerned this has to do with the change I made at the end of January and reversed back. I should note that I don't think these catalogs or the static page that links to them brought any traffic. The keywords I am concerned about fell on our homepage (where the link to the static page that contains the links to both catalogs is in the sitewide footer) The catalogs are a couple hundred pages. I honestly don't see how this could do it, unless it has something to do with the footer being sitewide? There have been site upgrades/dev changes over the last couple months too (although I am not sure if that affected other clients who received the same upgrade), so this is hard to pinpoint. Sorry this is so long but I'd appreciate someone offering some insight to help ease my mind a bit!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AliMac260 -
Topics and semantically related keywords
Hi, Imagine my main topic is "Bike tours in Holland. Let's imagine that I have decided to write about these 2 topics " Amsterdam " and "Gouda". To talk about those topics should I use the keywords that moz keyword tool gives me for the keyword "Bike tours in Holland" such as "trail, cycle routes, bike paths" and write something like "Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands is the perfect place to hit the road with your trail bike. There are miles of bike paths to cycle one etc... Or can I write something like Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands features some of the best museums in Europe. The Van Gogh museum, the Anne Franck house and the Rijksmuseum. Or is this second sentence talking about the museums wrong because it isn't talking about biking. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Site ranks good for all keywords except the important ones
Hey guys I am the marketing manager for https://www.tadibrothers.com/, i started a year ago when the website was ranked very poorly on most keywords, I got most of our nitch keywords rank well to fist page except the most important ones. backup camera
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TadiBrothers
backup camera system
wireless backup camera system
rear view camera Our backlinks campaign is doing well 15 backlinks on average every month.
on-site optimization is also good.
Our Domain authority is better than all our competitors. Can anyone Please help me to understand why they do not rank well? Hope to hear from someone soon1 -
How to measure traffic for a keyword
Sitting in Country A I want to see how much traffic a particular keyword receives in Country B. Whats the best way to do it? Also, will the search results differ if I am analyzing the above sitting in Country A viz-a-viz Country B. In other words, will the IP of the country I am making the search from play a role in the results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__0 -
Why does this site rank above us?
We own www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk and over the last 8 months have built some decent guest post, charity and customer links but still we seem to be beaten on good words such as banners, banner, vinyl banner, pvc banner etc by this website www-signfirm.com we just cannot figure out how this is happening and would be very grateful if someone with great wisdom could give us an in-site into why this is happening and we would be very grateful..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Can I Refine My Keyword List to Highlight Top (15) Keywords?
My client is wondering if I could provide him with a list of his site's 15 Top performing SEO keywords. However, based on the layout of everything I've used here on SEOMoz, I don't believe that's possible. Or, am i incorrect? Can you indeed come up with a list of Top (XX) SEO keywords for a given time period, for a campaign/website? Thanks ahead of time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandLabs0 -
Home page mysteriously not ranking at all
Hey everyone, I'm baffled by a situation. I started working on www.hushabyephotography.com almost 3 months ago. The first thing I did was changed the address (was previously blog.hushabyephotography.com) and updated all of the links pointing from the old name to the new "www" and used 301 redirects for canonicalization. Have also built some additional links, added content to the site, and performed on-page optimization to rank for the primary key phrase "san diego newborn photography". But ranking is no where to be found, I searched for the key phrase, and at rank 190 is a random subpage, not even the home page. The listing had also disappeared from Google Places a few weeks ago after the client updated their listing (which I believe was the result of the known Places bug (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-may-need-to-hide-your-google-places-address-asap). I'm at a loss here for ideas, as I've never failed to at least have a site on the radar. There aren't any spam links so I don't think any penalties are the result. One last thing, it ranks on page 2 in both Bing and Yahoo... Please help me out Mozzers!!! 😕
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Our keyword rank fell drastically since our last moz crawl. What gives?
Our site was just crawled last night an we had a number of keywords fall 25% or so, from say # 30 to 38. What would cause such a drastic fall? We haven't taken down pages or changed changed page titles, url or content. One thing we are having trouble with is our meta description and meta keywords for each page. Drupal 7 seems to be giving us trouble and the meta information isn't showing up anymore. Would that cause the fall? Any other suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drudalton1