About page showing in SERPS instead of Home page
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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!
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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!
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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?
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Get the brand out in the market and earn some back links (pure white hat on authority sites) on branded keyword
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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
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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.
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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.
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