Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
When doing a site search my homepage comes up second. Does that matter?
-
When I do a site: search the homepage comes up second. Does this matter?
-
Hi there, just checking in do see if you have an update for us.
Christy
-
http://germanhausbarn.com/ Here is the homepage. It is more informational then anything.
-
Sounds good. Let us know how things work out.
-
I am in the process of redoing our homepage. We actually do not have a lot of content on our homepage and virtually no keywords. That should be remedied in the next few weeks and we will see if that solves the problem.
-
What's the purpose of the home page? Is it purely navigational? Does it have any unique content on it?
Hard to assess whether there's a real problem or not and what that problem might be without taking a look at the site.
-
We've come across this situation a number of times. I have a very strong feeling that your homepage has over optimised anchor text. If you want to post or PM me the URL I can take a further look but the most common reason I see for this (over & over) is Panda (over optimisation, thin content, poor titles, incorrect canonicals, or anchor spam.)
It can also depend on your site & keywords. If you have an seo company for instance and a page at yoursite.com/seo, that page may rank better for your domain if it also includes the word SEO. Let me give an example because no matter how I write that, it's confusing.
If your domain is ouragency.com and your /seo page comes up first, chances are it's something I mentioned above.
However, if your domain is seoagency.com and your /seo page comes up first, it may just be that the /seo page is better optimised for the term.
-
It is just a basic site for a non-profit. Everything seems to be ok, I just thought it was weird. It looks like the homepage doesn't have an optimized enough title so I think that might be it.
-
I don't think it matters, but without knowing more about your site it's hard to say for certain.
See this article: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-site-command-ranking-12858.html
What's more important is that you have the right page getting visibility for the right keywords/topics so that you provide the best user experience and increase your chances of converting those visitors into customers/followers.
What page is coming up first? Can you make any guesses as to why?
What I have use the site: search for is to look at the top 10 pages and assess how well these reflect the products/services/topics for which the site wants to be associated with.
-
It isn't a keyword search it is a site:search. I have a copy of a site audit and it says that the homepage should come up first, but it doesn't.
-
Could you provide URLs for that?
I also dont' quite follow you - say you're looking for "plumber in Taos" -- do you mean that your site comes up 2nd?
-- if so good!Do you mean if you're searching for "Bills Plumbing Services" (your company name) and that comes up second?
- if so, then what comes up first?
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
-
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
Adult Toys Sites
Does anyone know of any changes SEOwise when running an adult toy site versus a normal eCommerce site? Is there any tips or suggestions that are worth knowing to achieve rankings faster? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Google cache is showing my UK homepage site instead of the US homepage and ranking the UK site in US
Hi There, When I check the cache of the US website (www.us.allsaints.com) Google returns the UK website. This is also reflected in the US Google Search Results when the UK site ranks for our brand name instead of the US site. The homepage has hreflang tags only on the homepage and the domains have been pointed correctly to the right territories via Google Webmaster Console.This has happened before in 26th July 2015 and was wondering if any had any idea why this is happening or if any one has experienced the same issueFDGjldR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adzhass0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Temporarily shut down a site
What would be the best way to temporarily shut down a site the right way and not have a negative impact on SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LibertyTax1 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSWD0 -
Multiple sites in the same niche
Hi All A question regarding multiple sites in the same niche... If I have say 10 sites all targetting the same niche yet all on different C-class IPs with different hosts, registrars, whois data and ages can I use the same template, or will Google discern a pattern? Basically I have developed a WordPress template which I want to use on the sites albeit with different logos / brand colours. NB/ All of the 10 sites will have unique, original content and they will NOT be interlinked
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielparry1 -
Badges For a B2b site
love this seo tactic but it seems hard to get people to adopt it Has anyone seen a successful badge campaign for a b2b site? please provide examples if you can.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0