Site Audit: Indexed Pages Issue
-
Over the last couple of months I've been working through some issues with a client. One of my starting points was doing a site Audit. I'm following a post written by Geoff Kenyon https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 .
One of the main issues of the site audit seems to be that when I run a "site:domain.com" query in Google my homepage isn't the first page listed in fact it isn't listed in this search when I go through all of the listings. I understand that it isn't required to have your homepage listed first when running this type of query, but I would prefer it.
Here are some things I've done
- I ran another query "info:homepage.com" and the home page is indexed by Google.
- When I run a branded search for the company name the home page does come up first.
- The current page that is showing up first in the "site:domain.com" listing is my blog index page.
- Several months back I redirected the index.php page to the root of the domain. Not sure if this is helping or hurting.
- In the sitemap I removed the index.php and left only the root domain as the page to index.
- Also all interior links are sent to the root, index.php has been eliminated from all internal links everything links to root
- The main site navigation does not refer to the "Home" page, but instead my logo is the link to the Home page.
- Should I noindex my blog/index.php page? This page is only a compilation of posts and does not have any original content instead it actually throws up duplicate content warnings.
Any help would be much appreciated. I apologize if this is a silly question, but I'm getting frustrated/ annoyed at the whole situation.
-
Thanks Seoman,
That was why I was wondering if I should noindex the blog index page. It is purely a listing of blog entries and not original content. It seems to throw up duplicate content issues and Google seems to give it the most page power on the site even though it is not my most important page.
I would want Google to still follow all of the links because those are the blog posts and the original content. I don't know if the noindex is the best choice but I think it at least it would tell Google "Hey guys the blog page is not my most important page. In fact it is just a compilation of posts"
I haven't pulled the trigger on it yet, because I don't know if it will hurt me more than it is helping. I just don't know. If anyone has any other thoughts on the noindex of the blog index page which is not my home page feel free to drop me a line.
-
Apologies I'd slightly misunderstood your question, I see exactly what you mean now. I think this is purely down to the way Google associates the search intent and tries to deliver the most appropriate result.
The site parameter is obviously intended to help users find a specific item on the specified site, therefore if the blog has more content than the other pages there is more chance that it will have what the user is looking for hence Google will deliver that page out of preference.
Don't know for sure but just an assumption.As you said branded searches are fine, there certainly doesn't look to be any issues as far as I can see although I haven't done a full audit.
Would be interested to see what anyone else says but my gut feeling is there is nothing to be worried about, the main thing is you come up for your company name and search terms that you want.
Sorry hope that helps somewhat.
All the best
-
Feel free to take a look www.denverilluminations.com & www.denverilluminations.com/_blog/ .
Also the domain authority is 19 for the site I was looking at the individual page authorities. Thanks again Seoman.
-
Anyway you could let me have the two links and I can give them a quick look over?
Also bear in mind that DA isn't everything.
-
Seoman,
Thanks for the response. I appreciate any and all suggestions
- Blog page has a page authority of 1 out of 100 the home page has a page authority of 33 out of 100
- I looked at google's cache for pages and reviewed the text only version and everything is showing.
- Checked robots and I'm disallowing certain directories that I don't want indexed or crawled but those are all in order and I tested the robots.txt just to make sure it was written properly and it came back clean.
I don't believe noindexing my blog page is absolutely necessary, but I'm kind of wondering if Google thinks that it is my home page instead of my regular root directory? I know it sounds a little weird but I'm wondering if something is confusing the spiders. Thanks again for your time and thoughts.
-
Few quick thoughts come to mind (in order of priority)
- Blog page may have more authority than the homepage
- Could be a technical issue with the homepage (Maybe Google can't see anything there)
- Check your robots.txt to make sure it's not blocked (Sounds crazy but can happen)
I would strongly advise against noindexing unless it is absolutely necessary.
Personally I wouldn't be too worried about the homepage not showing although, I agree it's a good idea to know why. After all no customers are going to be using Google search parameters like site or info. They are going to be searching for what they want and expecting an answer on the page that Google provides them with.
Not sure if that helps or not but just a few thoughts.
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
-
Local SEO: thoughts on driving users to a homepage or to a local landing page?
I work with a client who is about to launch a local landing page for one of their locations. They're worried that the new local landing page will cannibalize some of the keyword rankings for the homepage. Any advice on how to have a local presence but still drive people to the more valuable homepage?
Local Website Optimization | | jrridley0 -
Multi Location SEO Page Structure
I am trying to optimize my website for multiple locations. I have setup a landing page for each location. Now I want to optimize services we offer at those locations such as floor scrubber rentals. I'm confused on the best approach for this for ranking locally. I offer the same equipment for rent at each location. So... should I have a link on the location landing page that takes you to an individual floor scrubber rental page for each location optimized for that locations city or should I have just one floor scrubber rental page and would I optimize it for both cities or just optimize it for floor scrubber rentals in general? I have many different categories like this that are offered @ both locations. If I do individual pages all the products and rates will be duplicate but I could change the areas we deliver to and description to be more geared towards that city.
Local Website Optimization | | CougarChemMike0 -
Site Getting hacked
Hi There, My one Website gets hacked Again and Again, I had Reset Many times ,But again, Also generating unnecessary URLs to My website in Webmaster tools, Can anyone Help Me To Solve This Problem please? please help, thx in advance,
Local Website Optimization | | nupuriepl0 -
Does multiple sites that relate to one company hurt seo
I know this has been asked and answered but my situation is a little different. I am a local electrical contractor. I specialize in a service and not a product. Competition is high in the local market due to the other electrical contractors that have well seasoned sites with very good DA/PA. Although new to the web I am not new to the trade. Throughout years almost back to the AOL dialup days I have been collecting domain names for this particular purpose. Now I want to put them to good use. Being an electrical contractor, there are many different facets of work and services we provide. My primary site is empireelec.com A second site I threw online overnight with minimal content is jacksonvillelightingrepair.com. Although it is a fresh site, there is minimal content and I have put almost zero effort in to it. It appears to be ranking for keywords a lot quicker. That leads me to believe I should utilize my other domain jacksonvillefloridaelectrician.com and target just the keyword Jacksonville Florida Electrician. It leads me to believe I should use jacksonvillebeachelectrician.com for targeting electricians in jacksonville beach. And again with jacksonvilleelectricianservice.com I can provide a unique phone number for each site. Am I going about this all wrong? Everything I read says no,no,no but I feel my situation is a little more unique.
Local Website Optimization | | empireelec1 -
Landing pages of web pages for multiple cities served
I have a customer that services literally hundreds of towns. I'm trying to figure out the best way rank in each town. Should I create a landing page or a webpage for each city and optimize for each particular town ( facts/information about the town. SEO titles H1, H2 and alt tags? Thank you!
Local Website Optimization | | Miles230 -
Is my competitor doing something blackhat? - Cannot only access pages via serps , not from website navigation /search
Hi Mozzers, One of my competitors uses a trick whereby they have a number of different sitemaps containing location specific urls for their most popular categories on their eCommerce store. It's quite obvious that they are trying to rank for keyword <location>and from what I am see, you cant to any of these pages from their website navigation or search , so it's like these pages are separated from the main site in terms of accessing them but you can access the main website pages/navigation the other way round (i.e if you select one of the pages from finding it in serps) </location> I know that google doesn't really like anything you can't access from the main website but would you class this as blackhat ? / cheating etc ... They do tend to rank quite well for these alot of the pages and it hasn't seem to have affected pages on their main website in terms of rankings. I am just wondering , if it's worth us doing similar as google hasn't penalised them by the looks of things.. thanks Pete
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC120 -
Search Result Discrepancy: Keyword "Dresses" shows international sites in the search results of Google.co.in.
Hi All, What would be the reason that Google shows international websites in the first page results while there are huge local players available. Eg: Dresses - Keyword that shows results with almost all the results from International websites whereas the local big players in the same category are not shown. This is not the case for other keywords like Women dresses, Clothing, Shoes etc., Is it a bug or any particular reasons? Thanks,
Local Website Optimization | | Myntra0 -
Duplicate content on a proxy site?
I have a local client with a 500 page site.
Local Website Optimization | | TFinder
They advertise online and use traditional media like direct mail.
A print media company, Valpak, has started a website
And wants the client to use their trackable phone number
And a proxy website. When I type the proxy domain in the browser
It appears to be client home page at this proxy URL. The vendor
Wishes to track activity on its site to prove their value or something
My question is: is their any "authority" risk to my clients website
By allowing this proxy site??0