Homepage with a lower PR?
-
Can anybody give me an example of 2-4 sites that have lower PR on the homepage and a higher PR on secondary pages (about us, etc)?
And is there a way to search for such sites in Google?
Thanks
-
I remember several years ago working on a site for my brother, and we did actually have a higher toolbar page rank on a couple of interior pages than we did on the home page. I don't know how you would search for that or why you would want to, however.
I can tell you how I believe it happened to this site. My brother had had a personal site that evolved into a business site. He kept his product information on that personal site, and had an oscommerce store set up on the business domain in a subfolder. For years, the home page was just a placeholder, or even a redirect to the subfolder (I can't remember which).
We took the business portions of the personal site and redirected them to the appropriate pages and subfolders on the business site. For a while, those pages and subfolders had a higher toolbar PR than the homepage itself did. People linked directly to those product and category pages, and there was the redirect from the personal site, yet the home page had little attention.
-
Yes, each page has it's own PR.
-
Thanks for the answer, but as far as I know every single page has its own PR. Isn't that right?
-
Even if we use PA instead of PR, I am confident there is not any site which matches the pattern you described. It could be done on a test site by intentionally manipulating the links, but it would take a lot of effort. The example you shared is not realistically going to exist.
There may be sites with various internal pages which PR higher then the home page, but there are not a significant amount of links earned by support pages such as "Contact Us" or "About Us" on most websites. There can be rare exceptions but not one where all the conditions you described exist.
-
Thanks a lot for your exhasting reply, but could you give me an example of say 3 sites with the following situation (or similoar). A site has a menu with the following buttons (links) to respective pages:
Home - PR3
About us - PR4
Services - PR5
Contact us - PR4
So, the home page is the weakest in terms of PR values.
Thanks in advance.
-
Hi Vince.
What exactly do you mean by "PR"? Google internally uses PageRank as one of over 200 metrics when evaluating a page's placement in results. Google does not make that information available except for 3-4 times per year. PR has almost no value in daily SEO, even Google clearly and repeatedly has stated such. You may wish to read Susan Moskwa's discussion of this topic along with her advice to not use PR as a metric for evaluating websites: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/beyond-pagerank-graduating-to.html
One possible scenario where a website could have an internal page rank higher then the home page would be if the site performed an important interview. For example if a local website conducted an interview with the Vice-President, then the internal page which offered that article could receive coverage and links from hundreds of important sources around the country. The PR value of that page can then exceed the home page.
For an actual example, the best I can offer is using SEOmoz Page Authority (PA). A company called Screaming Frog offers SEO services but they are most famous for creating a web crawler. Their home page (http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/) has a PA of 57. The screaming frog crawler page (http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/) has a PA of 62.
I hope this helps.
** Edited reply based on feedback from Keri
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
-
Non-optimised pages ranking higher than optimised homepage
I'm a developer working with a dating site and we're having what appear to be unusual ranking behaviour for the keyword "Ukraine Brides". When searching for "Ukraine Brides" we typically have the top 3 results in Google, however the homepage is almost never ranked #1. Other non-optimised pages appear ahead of it. I believe this is having a negative affect on our conversion rate, so wish to see this resolved. For instance, if you search here in NZ, the results are typically: Login page (/account/login) Search page (/search) Home page (/) Similar situation when searching in the US, but typically the top result is the search page. Is this unusual? We've spent quite a bit of time optimising the homepage, it has more external links, more internal links, better content that targets the keyword, more traffic, etc. Even so, the login and search pages appear higher. A side note, the average CTR for "Ukraine Brides" is significantly lower than "Ukraine Brides Agency" (20% vs 80% respectively), so I don't think that it's purely a 'brand keyword'. A few thoughts were: The search page is not accessible from the homepage unless you are logged in. Maybe this is causing some sort of linking/seo/ranking issue? Re: the login page being higher, perhaps many existing users visit the login page directly from this keyword in order to login straight away so Google pushes this to the top. I think this is less likely because most existing users will be logged in automatically (via cookies "remember me") and the homepage has a login form in anycase The site supports multiple languages. Maybe this is causing some canonical issues? There was an additional suggestion that we should noindex the login and search pages in order to resolve this ranking issue, but were nervous that we'd lose a large amount of organic clicks if we did this. Google must be doing this for a reason, so we wanted to resolve that underlying reason before dropping the noindex hammer. The fear is of course that we've done something wrong with our homepage which is causing it to perform poorly and thus these other pages rank higher. The hope would be that if we fixed that, that our rank for other keywords would improve also. It would be great if we could get some more eyes on this to hopefully confirm we're not doing anything silly, and are just generally after a second opinion.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrew_uba0 -
Major Landing page removed from Google SERP and replace homepage URL.How do I fix it?
Hi Major Landing page removed from Google SERP and replace homepage URL.How do I fix it? In an SPA website (angularJS), Why it happens?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cafegardesh0 -
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 | | Doylejg30 -
Homepage meta title not indexing correctly on google
Hello everyone! We're having a spot of trouble with our website www.whichledlight.com The meta title is coming up wrong on google. In Google it currently reads out
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup
'Which LED Light: LED Bulbs & Lamps Compared'
when it should be
'LED Bulbs & Lamps Compared | Which LED Light' Last snapshot of the page from google was yesterday (5th April 2016) Anyone got any ideas?
Is all the markup correct in the ?0 -
Client would like to 301 redirect the homepage to a category page
Hello MOZ Community!!! I would like your expert opinions on a scenario, please! My client is an ecommerce company, and currently has one of its category pages outranking its homepage for a few key phrases. The homepage, however, has a better conversion rate. So, the client is asking that we make the homepage the category URL, so http://www.theirsite.com/blue-clothes. The existing homepage URL - http://www.theirsite.com - would 301 REDIRECT to the category page - which would render the current version of the homepage. Therefore, there would be nothing, ZERO content, on the MAIN URL: http://www.theirsite.com Has anyone ever done this before? What are the pros and the cons of this practice? Here is my same client, for reference: https://moz.com/community/q/issue-with-category-ranking-on-page-1-vs-homepage-ranking-on-page-2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
What would cause all main pages to go from various PR1 PR2 PR3 to PR Unranked?
Weird, my rankings have fallen on one of my sites and all the main pages that were ranking are now PR unranked. We did ad some domains to a disavow file, but nothing major that should have had an impact like this. Pages are all allowed to be indexed and not blocked and are currently indexed in Google. Can Google just come around and decide they don't like these pages anymore and PR unrank them all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0 -
Homepage 302 Redirect For SSL
Hi All, My site, http://domain.com, currently has a 302 redirect from http://domain.com to https://domain.com. The reason we have an SSL cert is because we have a registration and log in form on the homepage (as well as log in options in the top bar of every page on the site - email/password). My question is: When taking SEO best practices into account, would we be better having a 301 redirect from http://domain.com to https://domain.com as most of our inbound links are directed to http://domain.com. Thanks for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rogs.SEO0 -
Why PR does not grow?
Hi, I have a question about one of my sites whose PR does not want to increase. It's more of a curiosity, actually. the site pokercasinomania.com has been online since 2007. I had developed a link building campaign dedicated to it, so I have many links directing toward it. I just don't understand why the PR is stil 1. Also, at one point the PR had raised to 2, but it went back to 1 after less than a week. Can someone explain why this happened? Thank you very much. Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0