Why is my homepage ranking BELOW a subpage?
-
Search "peer to peer lending".
The page http://www.ratesetter.com/peer_to_peer_lending.htm appears higher than the homepage.
I don't think this is because of keyword density on page either as Zopa (competitor) have zero mentions of this keyword on their homepage.
What are your suggestions for getting the homepage ranked higher?
Thanks, Simon.
-
Remember you don't need to have that phrase exactly to be ranked for it. If the content has "peer" and "lending" in it, with some good off-page ranking "points" they could show higher than your site. Good luck!
-
I didn't dig into their site but I can tell you there is some sort of co-citation going on there. Rand did an awesome WBF a little while back that probably explains exactly what is going on.
-
Thanks vzPRO, appreciate you doing an on-page. I've done this already and recognise the good ratings of each page. The subpage is more keyword rich but if you refer to my reply to Kevin this is what is confusing me.
-
Thanks TommyTan. Yes indeed it does, but see my reply to Kevin above.
-
Thanks Kevin. This is what I find odd though, if you search the term "peer to peer lending" our competitor Zopa appears top with their homepage as the result. They have NO mention of "peer to peer lending" whatsoever on their homepage.
-
I've seen strong correlation between the keyword being in the page name / url and rankings but in general a sub-page is generally more targeted for a keyword.
I just ran the seomoz on-page report card for your home page and sub page with the keyword being peer to peer lending and though they both received an "A" there were more factors helping the sub page.
-
Google feels that that page is more relevant for that keyword than the homepage. Just looking at the on-page factors, I agree w/Google. The url, heading and overall copy seems to reflect that term more than the home page. Also, this page is much better landing page than the home page for people searching for info on this term.
-
Hi Simon,
I just have to say it even though it may not be the reason, does your subpage have more keywords and content than the home page for bots to crawl?
Another reason may be because you are getting more backlinks and social share on your subpage than your home page. Google may find that your subpage provide the better result to searchers than the home page because it might have more backlinks or contents for them to crawl.
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
-
How long until links lead to a ranking increase?
I've gotten some good links to my homepage recently. How long until I'm likely to see an increase in ranking? Let me know, thanks.
Link Building | | RafeConnection1 -
I am searching for page ranks but all results show 0
i am searching for page ranks but all results show pr 0 when i search, doesnt matter if the site is a pr ma or a pr10, i was using scrapebox to find the backlinks but now nothing is showing as far as pr goes, i have also used various websites to check the page ranks and still get the same results. maybe its my ip but i doubt it cus i am using private proxies. any idea guys? cRbWC65
Link Building | | djgbshows0 -
Backlinks from subdomain, can it hurt ranking?
I just started doing an SEO audit and noticed I have 40,000 some odd back links from an OLD version of our site that has been moved to a subdomain. The back links are for articles that already exist on our main site. I don't think Google is picking it up as duplicate content because that site isn't being crawled anymore. Could this hurt us SEO wise? I plan on removing the site, but how long after it's been removed should those back links disappear?
Link Building | | MMAffiliate0 -
Puzzled by high ranking page (#2 in SERPs) with zero/low page or domain authority
So, I get the smoothie that is page authority and domain authority and the link metrics that Moz uses to predict how well a page will rank for a certain keyword. I can look at a specific search term where we are on say, page 2 or 3, with a page authority of 1 and domain authority of 26, I get why competitors rank above us. But then I look at a keyword that is much more competitive, where we rank #2, which is awesome, where the landing page is also showing a page authority of 1, and domain authority of 26. How can we rank higher than competitors with a page authority of 56 and domain authority of 65? Their onpage optimization for the keyword is no worse, and sometimes better that ours but we maintain this ranking. By the way the competition also have hundreds if not thousands more linking root domains than our page. Any ideas why one keyword is a rockstar and one is a dud, with the same poor PA and DA?
Link Building | | seo-lab1 -
Struggling to re-rank website
A client of ours - www.helenbattphotography.com - was ranking well for local keywords. However, the rankings started to drop as of January this year (slowly) and quite considerably since May. We have not had any Google penalties. To date we have gone through backlinks and removed a few low quality/dubious links that were built around 5 years ago by another agency the client was using and also disavowed some others. This was done around 2 months ago. No impact to date. The website is hovering around page 4 and 5 for the keywords that it used to rank for on page 1 for. We are really struggling to increase the rankings for this client. We have introduced good, unqiue content to the site - not that this was ever really a problem on the site - but this has also made little difference. Would be great to get some feedback on the site and any obvious pointers that we might be missing here - a case of not being able to see the wood through the trees. Thanks
Link Building | | piperis0 -
How can I Improve My Site Page Rank?
How can I improve my site page rank? We were a three now a two as of today. How can I get it back to three at least or more?
Link Building | | AppleCapitalGroup0 -
Link building for rankings VS Link building for relationships
A Big Shout To Everyone -- Good Morning and What's Up 🙂 As I read today through seomoz professional guide to link building and the section why link building matters and in addition to this a newsletter I received today that changed my whole thinking towards link building for rankings vs for relationships. It is already happening on social networks if you are active there, but what about on your website. What are your thoughts on the following ? Google's job is provide the most relevant results to surfers online, and looking the link profile of a site & the page itself is the key to determining which page to serve on plate to the surfers link query ! Webmasters Site Objective:
Link Building | | helpwanted
I think that we as webmasters have to ask ourselves what do we want to achieve with link building. To get quick traffic or build slow authority links, high rankings, lead generation, sales & other things here I may be missing etcccc Other Objective Networking & Relationship Building Alliances : What I discovered today is that building links for 1st page rankings are great and will provide me with steady traffic, but not all of it is targeted traffic, but what else can I do to bring targeted traffic and at the same time try to build alliances with other related non competing business owners online. The idea... is to apply old school networking / relationship building alliances to get targeted traffic to my site that can actually benefit from my services. How Do We Achieve This I become a editor for approving resource links for me site, only the best will be placed on my site as a resource. Build a valuable tightly themed categorized resource section with related non competing resources that can help my sites visitors find what they are looking for, send visitors to non competing resources that may purchase their services which helps me build a relationship with them, and may can with rankings as well, provided I am selective with my qualification process. Questions & Concerns Below : What should I be thinking about when creating a resource categorized links page How many outgoing do follow links should I allow from this links partner page How will this links resource page affect my own SE 1st Page Rankings and is it worth it based on getting targeted traffic Any pros / cons I may be missing here0 -
So I ran into a site that was not ranking 4 days ago and has over 2 million links to it on some keywords. My guess is this is a link bomb, but the issue is this is pushing one of my sites down. Does anyone know a good way to over come a bomb like this?
So I ran http://www.riogrande.com/ into this site not that long ago and wanted to see if any other SEO's have an opinion on it. I've seen a Google bomb before, but the amount of links going into this URL is insane. The thing is how does one over come a Google Bomb? Do you just wait to see what Google does or do you just hope to rank under that URL? I should also note that it appears that all the keywords to it are relevant to the sites content. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks
Link Building | | kateG12980