Dealing with a category page that is optimised & ranks for same keyword as homepage

[Red_Mud_Rookie]

Hi,

I'm working with a very niche website where only one product is sold. This means there is a small keyword set (just variations of same keyword) that we are optimising for.

Currently the homepage www.example.com ranks in position 2 for target term - "sample". But there is also a required deeper page www.example.com/sample which has lots and lots of internal links targeted to "sample" pointing to it. This page ranks position 8. Effectively this is optimising the deeper page for the same keyword as for the home page through internal anchir text. This deeper page must exist as it has much more detailed information about the product.

We want the homepage to rank highest and I'm trying to figure out if we are confusing Google and splitting authority between 2 pages. Best result for us would be to have homepage in position 1 and the deeper page can disappear (total visits would increase).

So the question is, is there a solution to do this? My initial thought was use canonical tag on the www.example.com/sample page specifiying www.example.com. Can we do this? Its not duplicate content.

Other option I considered is to nofollow links to the deeper page. Again not sure if this will have positive or negative impact. My fear is by removing 40 odd internal links with "sample" anchor text will reduce relevancy of the domain as a whole for the "sample" keyword.

Any help much appreciated!

Thanks

[EGOL]

If I owned this site I would figure out how to accomplish my goals for ANY traffic that flows into this internal page and roll out a big WELCOME sign on that page.... This is where you can buy widgets!

I would want to take in money with BOTH hands rather than just one.

[josh-riley]

Deeper pages that rank help lift the authority of the main URL/domain. (Think like a pyramid; the more "voted" content you have on your site, the better.) Obviously for you, links to your main URL (which can often be the easiest to get) should be manageable for you to achieve. Good luck!

[Red_Mud_Rookie]

Hi Andrea,

Thanks for your detailed reply, the problem is not really that this deeper page ranks. Its whether I can leverage the authority this deeper page holds to push the homepage to position 1.

We are about to set a new linkbuilding campaign once we have figured this out, as I want to make sure we have nothing working against us within the site before starting on this.

Thanks again for your help

[josh-riley]

Google sometimes will do this if it thinks that the deeper page (in this case) is a more relevant to the search query. And, optimizing is merely a way to indicate to Google what you want them to think a page is about; there's no promise that Google will agree.

Even with a small website, something outside of the homepage will rank - Google will crawl the site and offer up additional pages to searchers if they think there's good content there, regardless if you intentionally optimized said page or not. Trying to block out all the other pages isn't necessarily the best strategy. Rather than look at how your other pages work against you, look at how they can work for you. If you didn't put a no index tag on the page and it's already ranking, that's not a solution that works best for after the fact (but something to keep in mind as the site grows).

Sounds like part of the problem is that even with a few pages you cannibalized by trying to only use one keyword/variation. Even if the content isn't 100% the same, Google can interpret it as similar enough. Dr Pete did an excellent blog that may be able to offer some insight. I'll preface that he wrote about duplicate content, however it goes through when to use things like canonicals (not something that fits your case) so it may be helpful to at least read up and confirm what won't fix it: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world (he specifically mentions how canonicalizing your site to one URL can do lots of damage).