About page showing in SERPS instead of Home page
-
I launched a daycare website a few months ago. For some reason Google does not like my home page. I know there is a lot more I can do to promote the website in general, but I can't figure out why, when I search for the brand name, the about page shows up followed by a few external listings, but no result for the home page anywhere. It is indeed indexed (checked site: and tried searching for an exact phrase in quotes and ran all the tests in webmaster tools), but it just isn't showing up.
Can anyone see anything I'm missing? If you google "hello world daycare" (in victoria bc, canada) you'll see the about page for helloworlddaycare.com.
Any help you can provide to solve this mystery would be much appretiated!
-
Ok, I guess it's maily a matter of doing general domain wide seo then and being patient. Still not entirely sure why a subpage would be considered higher authority as the main page all other things being equal, but thanks for the answers!
-
Hi -
You will have to earn some authority for the domain to be able to rank the home page first. Since there is almost no authority on site, google believes that the about page is better.
What i'd do?
-
Get the brand out in the market and earn some back links (pure white hat on authority sites) on branded keyword
-
Something to consider -- you consider the canonical with "/" in the end for homepage, whereas your site doesn't show up that way. I'd propose you either trail it with "/" in both places or not. But be consistent.
I'm sure this will work. It's just matter of time.
- Kiruba
-
-
The canonical tags look fine. I don't think that's the issue here. I think this is just a newer domain that doesn't have a lot of links. When I popped the site into Majestic SEO the About, Blog and Home Page had the, or similar citation flow. Though it's not the entire link profile, that's something to think about.
There are some general things that could possibly be done to improve the site itself. There's a lot of different CSS files. There's also inline styling. If it can be done, it would be a good idea to get rid of the inline styles and combine/minify the CSS rules.
Plus the text to code ratio is pretty low all around. You may want to consider ways to add more content, or reduce the amount of code. This isn't a huge deal, and there isn't an exact percentage, but with few links to go on - the next consideration is on-page content.
So, I would say try to get more niche/local directory links pointed at the home page and this will eventually work itself out. I wouldn't jump the gun and attempt to remove the about page. Plus, I'm fairly certain demotion is related to site links in that would show under the domain in organic search.
-
Have you implemented Rel=canonical tags properly? That might be a contributing factor.
Another thing you might try is going into Google Webmaster Tools and demoting the About page. Sometimes that will help push other pages higher up in priority for SERP.
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
-
What is the SEO value of images of geographic areas (states, counties, cities) on a page?
We want to put images for specific geographic locations on some new pages we are building and I am wondering if: A) What the SEO value of adding these images would be? B) Suggested Sources for the images. Right now we are looking at using panoramio, but would love some MOZ community advice! Thank you for your help MOZ Community!
Image & Video Optimization | | AlyssaN0 -
Amount of time for info from local directories to show up in search engines
How long does it typically take for data to start showing up in search engines when you register on local directories and the yellow pages? For example, outside of google and bing, how long would it take for info to show up in the engines if I registered with the services on Get Listed?
Image & Video Optimization | | netlover0 -
Video on Home page
Would it be good SEO practice to place a video on the home page? http://villasdiani.com Right in the middle of the home page is a text about Villas Diani, I would like to remove it and rather place there always one of our newest videos which will start play once somebody lands there. As we are the only one of our competitor who has also videos of property rentals I would like to make out of it an advantage for our website which is not ranking:-( I am very new to seo and I am very scared to do such move which might even worsen all:-( I will appreciate any help
Image & Video Optimization | | VillasDiani0 -
Would listing an address on a location page for a franchise count as a citation?
If a small franchise with 15 locations implemented location pages for each location including address and phone then made them crawlable by the search engines and also accessible through a store locator, would this be counted as a citation for the location?
Image & Video Optimization | | JoshuaRich60 -
Does google places mind listing cities on the home page
Hello, A site in our industry is listing a bunch of cities on their home page and ranking for them. Like "Our dog training facility provides services to dogs in city1,city2,city3,city4,city5,city6 state" where the cities and states are relatively in their area. It's working organically, will this confuse google places? Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Google images indexing on no-index html page?
Hi, I wonder if a image can get indexed, included in google images if it is located on a html page with a no-follow tag? Thanks for your help.
Image & Video Optimization | | wildnis0 -
I understand that in addition to video sitemaps, a transcription of a video, if presented properly will help google and may help SEO. I cannot find information on the basics to add transcription properly to a page. Advice or direction appreciated.
Looking for guidance or information on the nuts and bolts of how to use transcriptions with video.
Image & Video Optimization | | hughman0 -
Setting Up Localized City Pages and Duplicate Content issues
We are setting up landing pages on our site that will cater to specific cities, in an effort to be more relevant to the users in those cities and also capture more localized traffic. These regional pages will each have a unique paragraph at the top, but below that is a sentence or two about each product line that would be difficult to rewrite with quality more than 10 - 15 times. Would the paragraph at the top of the page be enough unique content (about 4-5 sentences)? Obviously the duplicate content wouldn't be to my advantage, but is it really necessary to rewrite the other sentences about the product lines? What's the most efficient method to complete this project in a whitehat fashion?
Image & Video Optimization | | InetAll0