How to make my good sub-page rank ahead of my generic home page?

[GregB123]

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!

[katandmouse]

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!

[GregB123]

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....

[billhartzer]

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.