How to make my good sub-page rank ahead of my generic home page?
-
I have an ecommerce site for the clothes drying racks my family business makes, and it sells a few other laundry items also. It's about 5 years old. We used to rank on the first page for basic phrases like "clothes drying rack" and "umbrella clothesline".
About 1.5 years ago we fell hard in the rankings. Since then "umbrella clothesline" has moved back to the first page, but "clothes drying rack" is stuck on the 3rd page and always with the result being the generic homepage instead of the good sub-page (which used to rank on the first page) that really shows-n-tells about our drying rack.
Here are the three pages I am talking about. Home page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/ Drying rack page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/clothes-drying-rack-main.html and umbrella clothesline page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/umbrella-clotheslines.html
Any ideas on how to get the drying rack page to start ranking well again? (hopefully better than the generic homepage ranks)
A little technical background: the Moz campaign on this site says that the home page has a PA = 42 with 190 LRD's and 344 external links. Both the umbrella clothesline page and the clothes drying rack page have almost equal statistics of PA = 35 with 20 LRD's and 23 external links.
My anchor text distribution is maybe unbalanced. The drying rack page has 15 external links with the anchor of "Clothes Drying Rack". But the umbrella clothesline page has 14 external links with the anchor of "outdoor umbrella clothesline" and it ranks on the first page for that search.
I can't figure out how to get OSE to tell me anchor text stats for just the homepage and not the whole site since www.bestdryingrack.com/index.html 301's to the plain www.bestdryingrack.com (if you know how, please share)
What's wrong with my poor neglected clothes drying rack page? The only way I can get it to show up on the first page is to do a real specific search like "round wooden clothes drying rack"
Your help could save a faltering family business. Thank you!
-
I see you on page 2 so at least you're moving up.
Here's what I would suggest. Take out clothes drying rack out of your meta title and save that for the other page. That shouldn't be there anyway. You sell "laundry equipment that is handsome and strong," and your home page supports that with wringer washers, clotheslines, clothespins, etc., and not just drying racks.
Also it appears to me that you are focusing on drying racks on your home page. Your reviews are about drying racks and you say "We are very proud of our laundry drying rack and other products." Why not just say "we are proud of our laundry equipment." If you're afraid of losing the rank you have, I wouldn't. You are on page 2 behind Target, Bed, Bath and Beyond, Amazon, etc., etc. What do you have to lose? At least test it. You can always put it back.
BTW: There is a typo in one of your reviews: "clothes frying rack." I'm not sure as it stands it's a good review.
I see this all the time with home pages cannibalizing subpages and have my own discussion going at http://moz.com/community/q/home-page-cannibal. The solution to yours seems a little more obvious than mine. Let's hope!
-
Thanks Bill. The big drop actually happened back in mid 2012, with partial recovery since then. We do make little text tweaks to the pages fairly often. We do some social media outreach each week.
Still need to know why the clothes drying rack page does so poorly in comparison to the other pages....
-
Gregory, without doing a full SEO analysis, it's difficult to pinpoint what exactly is going on here. However, doing some checks with a few tools, I was able to see that there are a few things that could be effecting rankings. For example, the page hasn't been updated since <tt>30·Jan·2014</tt>, which might be around the time that the page started to have an issue with rankings?
I would update the page again with some new copy to see if that will help. Sometimes when you refresh a page it will cause Google to like it again (query deserves freshness type of thing). You could also get some more social shares of the page (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, etc.) and some new fresh links to the page.
I wouldn't get too caught up, though, in the actual pages and their rankings. This will fluctuate from time to time, and it really can drive you bonkers if you're obsessing over individual page rankings. What I would focus on is building your site's overall authority with new links from trusted authority sites. This will elevate all of your pages in the rankings, and make your pages more "algorithm proof", meaning that when Google changes something in the algorithm your rankings are going to have less of a chance of being effected by those changes.
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
-
Website ranking on Google dropping for unknown reason while rankings are improving on Bing. Please help!
one of my websites www.resumeble.com is showing a constant drop in rankings. Earlier the website was ranking for major keywords like resume writing services etc. I used Ahrefs site audit to find issues. According to Ahrefs there was a huge issue of duplicate pages, which is now resolved by proper canonical tag insertion. The site is built on Angular. Fetch report in Google shows perfect code and Sitemap is also perfect. Manual action reporting in webmaster shows no warning. Please suggest what steps should I take to fix this issue.
Technical SEO | | mayyaa40 -
My Website's Home Page is Missing on Google SERP
Hi All, I have a WordPress website which has about 10-12 pages in total. When I search for the brand name on Google Search, the home page URL isn't appearing on the result pages while the rest of the pages are appearing. There're no issues with the canonicalization or meta titles/descriptions as such. What could possibly the reason behind this aberration? Looking forward to your advice! Cheers
Technical SEO | | ugorayan0 -
Home page duplicate content...
Hello all! I've just downloaded my first Moz crawl CSV and I noticed that the home page appears twice - one with an appending forward slash at the end: http://www.example.com
Technical SEO | | LiamMcArthur
http://www.example.com/ For any of my product and category pages that encounter this problem - it's automatically resolved with a canonical tag. Should I create the same canonical tag for my home page? rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" />0 -
Advice on whether we 301 redirect a page or update existing page?
Hi guys, any advice would be really appreciated. We have an existing page that ranks well for 'red widgets'. The page isn't monetised right now, but we're bringing in a new product onto our site that we optimised for 'blue widgets'. Unfortunately, not enough research was done for this page and we've now realised that consumers actually search for 'red widgets' when looking for the product we're creating as 'blue widgets'. The problem with this is that the 'red widgets' page is in a completely different category of our site than what it needs to be (it needs to be with 'blue widgets'). So, my question is; Should we do a 301 redirect from our 'red-widgets' page to our 'blue-widgets' page which we want to update and optimise the content on there for 'red-widgets'. Or, should we update the existing red-widgets page to have the right products and content on there, even thought it is in the wrong place of our site and users could get confused as to why they are there. If we do a 301 redirect to our new page, will we lose our rankings and have to start again, or is there a better way around this? Thanks! Dave
Technical SEO | | davo230 -
Can Google show the hReview-Aggregate microformat in the SERPs on a product page if the reviews themselves are on a separate page?
Hi, We recently changed our eCommerce site structure a bit and separated our product reviews onto a a different page. There were a couple of reasons we did this : We used pagination on the product page which meant we got duplicate content warnings. We didn't want to show all the reviews on the product page because this was bad for UX (and diluted our keywords). We thought having a single page was better than paginated content, or at least safer for indexing. We found that Googlebot quite often got stuck in loops and we didn't want to bury the reviews way down in the site structure. We wanted to reduce our bounce rate a little, so having a different reviews page could help with this. In the process of doing this we tidied up our microformats a bit too. The product page used to have to three main microformats; hProduct hReview-Aggregate hReview The product page now only has hProduct and hReview-Aggregate (which is now nested inside the hProduct). This means the reviews page has hReview-Aggregate and hReviews for each review itself. We've taken care to make sure that we're specifying that it's a product review and the URL of that product. However, we've noticed over the past few weeks that Google has stopped feeding the reviews into the SERPs for product pages, and is instead only feeding them in for the reviews pages. Is there any way to separate the reviews out and get Google to use the Microformats for both pages? Would using microdata be a better way to implement this? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | OptiBacUK
James0 -
Why is this site ranking so good?
Site in question: http://bit.ly/aBvVbm Our main competitor in the UK seems to be ranking extremely good for the keyword "jigsaw puzzles" even though their linking profile doesn't seem all that great? They mainly have site-wide links on 2 of their other ecommerce sites which seem to be given them their ranking power as this equals to 100's of links. Does sitewide links on 2 sites really give this much ranking power or am I missing something?
Technical SEO | | Tonyy30 -
Home page canonical issues
I think I’ve got a canonical issue with a client’s site that I’m having problems with I’ve noticed in their analytics that they receive traffic from themselves. I’ve used ‘ rel canonical’ throughout the site to avoid any dup issues and I have 301’ed every other variation of the home page I can think of. I don’t have full access to the back end of the host to control any of the iis as it’s an asp site. They seem to be getting traffic from their site under the URL of, example.com I’ve 301 redirected www.example.com/home.asp www.example.com/default.asp www.example.com/index.asp to www.example.com And 'rel canonical' the home page to www.example.com but still seem to be having the same problem any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | FarkyRafiq0 -
Nofollowing to boost internal page rankings.
I have a site with 200 links on the homepage, how much will it boost nofollowing the other links boost the 50 pages we care most about?
Technical SEO | | adamzski0