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.
Homepage appearing instead of subpage
-
Hi,
I have my homepage which has links saying "bike tours and bike tours in France" because in the past I was only doing bike tours in France. I now do tours all over Europe and I have a page about "bike tours in Franc" only.
The issue I have is that my page about "bike tours in France" never appears in the search ranking it is always my homepage that does for tjhe keyword "bike tours in France". My guess is that it is due to the links that my homepage has ?
How could I make sure my France page appears instead of my homepage ?
Thank you,
-
Thank you that confirms my thinking
-
We run into this a lot at the agency I work for. Many of our clients have outstanding sub-pages for their specific services – such as bike tours – but none of those sub-pages ever rank. Their home page ranks for just about any relevant keyword.
We find that 9/10, this is an authority issue. Any backlinks the site has are to the homepage, and the majority of their sub-pages have zero backlinks, therefore very little authority – if any at all.
Our solution to this is do short-term link building campaigns with a focus on the sub-page. Perhaps writing content specifically on bike tours, with a link from the post to the service page, could be helpful. You can even submit your site to local directories, and when appropriate, link to that specific page, opposed to the home page, to gain some authority.
Best of luck, I hope this helps!
-
I think you should improve the content the France page... It's a pleasure to have been useful
-
I got the structure si all I can do now is remove the links that say bike tours france and that go to the homepage or improve the content of the france page ? Correct ?
Thank you for your detailled reply,
-
The structure of a website or a blog is of great importance for its chances to rank in search engines.
1. A decent structure makes sure Google ‘understands’ your site.
The way your website is structured will give Google important clues about where to nd the most important content. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine can understand what your site is about, and how easily it will nd and index the content relevant to your site’s purpose and intent.2 A decent structure makes sure you do not compete with your own content.
On your site, you will probably write multiple pages about similar topics.If we would write eight different articles about bike tours, Google would not know which of the articles or page is the most important one. If you do not solve this by creating a clear site structure, you will be competing with our own articles for a high ranking in Google. Solving this problem requires a good internal linking structure and/or taxonomy structure, resulting in higher rankings. This means that you should pick one article (the flagship article/page/product ) for every major keyword you want to be found for and link to that article from all of your other content about the same keyword.How this apply to your website ?
So you need to create a site structure who reflects that hierarchy. You mentioned that your main products/service is "bike tours Europe".Let's take an example1. bike tours Europe
1.1 bike tours France
1.2 bike tours Spain
1.3 bike tours ItalySo probably in your case your case your homepage is optimized for "bike tours in France"
there are many links pointing to your site with that anchor text (Make a backlink analysis)
if Google is putting your homepage in the first place you need figure out why?Once you do that you need to define your structure in order to make it easy for Google to understand your website.
IF THIS ANSWER WERE USEFUL MARK IT AS A GOOD ANSWER
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
-
After hack and remediation, thousands of URL's still appearing as 'Valid' in google search console. How to remedy?
I'm working on a site that was hacked in March 2019 and in the process, nearly 900,000 spam links were generated and indexed. After remediation of the hack in April 2019, the spammy URLs began dropping out of the index until last week, when Search Console showed around 8,000 as "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap" but listed as "Valid" in the coverage report and many of them are still hack-related URLs that are listed as being indexed in March 2019, despite the fact that clicking on them leads to a 404. As of this Saturday, the number jumped up to 18,000, but I have no way of finding out using the search console reports why the jump happened or what are the new URLs that were added, the only sort mechanism is last crawled and they don't show up there. How long can I expect it to take for these remaining urls to also be removed from the index? Is there any way to expedite the process? I've submitted a 'new' sitemap several times, which (so far) has not helped. Is there any way to see inside the new GSC view why/how the number of valid URLs in the indexed doubled over one weekend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Aug 12, 2019, 8:56 AM | rickyporco0 -
Google Adding Wrong Location to Title Tag on Multi-Branch Business Homepage
We're a business with 5 separate locations across 5 cities in Upstate NY. While doing some visual ad previews in the adwords interface I noticed that Google is altering my title tag and adding the word "Rochester" to the end of it, cutting short my designated title tag. Rochester is the location of our headquarters so not a big deal for 1/5th of our customers. But to my dismay, the same thing is happening when searching from the geo locations of my other branches. So when searching for my business in Buffalo (we have a physical address in Buffalo), the title tag in the results still says our company name and "Rochester". This of course is likely leading to confusion and actively harming our organic CTR in our branch locations. This is happening in all of the remaining 4 branch locations. I'm at a loss, I tried lengthening the title tag but it still gets cut off. The term Rochester appears (as do the other branch locations) in my meta description for the homepage as well as in the text of the page itself. I haven't gone so far as to remove that yet and hopefully don't have to. Does anyone have any ideas? Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 31, 2017, 12:20 AM | Doylejg30 -
No matter what the keyword, only the homepage shows in the SERP
Hi, wondered if someone could help. My clients website shows up well for terms but its always the homepage rather than the targeted landing page. For example, if you search for "teeth whitening anglesey" they appear http://goo.gl/ohJdua however, its the homepage rather than the tooth whitening page http://goo.gl/uVI8gK Thanks Ade
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 26, 2015, 9:50 AM | popcreativeltd0 -
Block in robots.txt instead of using canonical?
When I use a canonical tag for pages that are variations of the same page, it basically means that I don't want Google to index this page. But at the same time, spiders will go ahead and crawl the page. Isn't this a waste of my crawl budget? Wouldn't it be better to just disallow the page in robots.txt and let Google focus on crawling the pages that I do want indexed? In other words, why should I ever use rel=canonical as opposed to simply disallowing in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 23, 2014, 11:19 AM | YairSpolter0 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 25, 2014, 12:03 PM | SO_UK0 -
How to NOT appear in Google results in other countries?
I have ecommerce sites the only serve US and Canada. Is there a way to prevent a site from appearing in the Google results in foreign countries? The reason I ask is that we also have a lot of informational pages that folks in other countries are visiting, then leaving right after reading. This is making our overall Bounce Rate very high (64%). When we segment the GA data to look at just our US visitors, then the Bounce Rate drops a lot. (to 48%) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 4, 2014, 6:05 AM | GregB1230 -
My website (non-adult) is not appearing in Google search results when i have safe search settings on. How can i fix this?
Hi, I have this issue where my website does not appear in Google search results when i have the safe search settings on. If i turn the safe search settings off, my site appears no problem. I'm guessing Google is categorizing my website as adult, which it definitely is not. Has anyone had this issue before? Or does anyone know how to resolve this issue? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Aug 16, 2013, 4:49 AM | CupidTeam0 -
Easy way to change wordpress category titles. Currently categories are appearing with the same title?!
I'm working on a wordpress adult dating review site and have started to set up categories for each of my main keywords. I have also started to add sub categories by county and town and so far have done so for the counties of 'Lincolnshire' and 'Derbyshire'. The problem is though that for each of my subcategories the page titles are appearing the same. For example: www.mysite.com/category/online-dating/lincolnshire/spalding (root category online dating) shows the title as 'Spalding'. www.mysite.com/category/adult-dating/lincolnshire/spalding also has the title 'Spalding' even though it's root category is different (adult dating). It's probably easier to go to http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com to see how it's set up. If you click in the category text in the top menu and navigate to dating/derbyshire/alfreton for example and then adult dating/derbyshire/alfreton you'll notice the page titles are the same. I use all in one SEO pack and have rewrite titles checked with category titles set to %category_title% | %blog_title%. I also use category SEO updater. In order to prevent duplicate content issues how can I simply make the title of each category category root title/category subtitle(county)/category subtitle 2(town). The title of each category page would then read for example Online Dating Lincolnshire Spalding.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 29, 2013, 10:14 AM | SamCUK0