Exact match .org Ecommerce: Reason why internal page is ranking over home page
-
Hello,
We have a new store where an internal category page (our biggest category) is moving up ahead of the home page. What could be the reason for this? It's an exact match .org. Over-optimization? Something else?
It happened both when I didn't optimize the home page title tag and when I did for the main keyword, i.e. mainkeyword | mainkeyword.org, or just mainkeyword.org Home Page. Both didn't help with this.
We have very few backlinks.
Thanks
-
This resolved. It was internal link anchor text
-
how are you measuring "moving up"? is this a multi-word query you are using? are you using external rank checking tools or a browser search? Are you incognito in that query?
my guess here is this is a result of internal linkjuice and the signal generated from that is better than that of the homepage, specifically on that term.it is also forecast that this "moving up" is generally considered to be temporary in nature - are there changes since posting?
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
-
Will Reduced Bounce Rate, Increased Pages/Session, Increased Session Duration-RESULT IN BETTER RANKING?
Our relaunched website has a much lower bounce rate (66% before, now 58%) increased pages per session (1.89 before, now 3.47) and increased session duration (1:33 before, now 3:47). The relaunch was December 20th. Should these improvements result in an improvement in Google rank? How about in MOZ authority? We have not significantly changed the content of the site but the UX has been greatly improved. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
I have a lot of spammy links coming to my 404 page (the URLs have been removed now). Should i re-direct to Home?
I have a lot of spammy links pointing at my website according to MOZ. Thankfully all of them were for some URLs that we've long since removed so they're hitting my 404. Should i change the 404 with a 301 and Re-Direct that Juice to my home page or some other page or will that hurt my ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jagdecat0 -
Optimized pages ranking lower than homepage with keywords
Ok, I know this question has been out there before, but i don't know how fo search for it specifically enough. I have several keywords that rank higher on my home page. As you know MOZ assigns keywords to whichever page on your site popping up in search first. So even though i have A-grade optimized pages for a particular keyword, that page may not pop up BEFORE the homepage for instance, on searches. In many cases, the homepage is grade "F" for a particular keyword, yet its pulling up first for most of my keywords. I know that my homepage has more rank because it gets the most visits and i'm sure we can't really optimize the homepage for EVERY keyword. What is the best thing to do in this situation? Do i just need to wait for my optimized page to catch up in rank, or is there a trick to optimizing homepage to ALL key words at grade "A" level? Do i need to keep back-linking to my optimized page directly to get the juice up? I created all these great optimized pages for specific keywords, but my homepage which shows "F" grade is the one pulling up 4th or 5th on searches Help??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DrMcCoy0 -
Consistent Ranking Jumps Page 1 to Page 5 for months - help needed
Hi guys and gals, I have a really tricky client who I just can't seem to gain consistency with in their SERP results. The keywords are competitive but what the main issue I have is the big page jumps that happen pretty much on a weekly basis. We go up and down 40 positions and this behaviour has been going on for nearly 6 months.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jon_bangonline
I felt it would resolve itself in time but it has not. The website is a large ecommerce website. Their link profile is OK in regards to several high quality newspaper publication links, majority brand related anchor texts and the link building we have engaged in has all been very good i.e. content relevant / high quality places. See below for some potential causes I think could be the reason: The on page SEO is good however the way their ecommerce website is setup they have formed a substantial amount of duplicate title tags. So in my opinion this is a potential cause. The previous web developer set-up 301 redirects all to their home page for any 404 errors. I know best practice is to go to the most relevant pages, however could this be a potential issue? We had some server connectivity issues show up in webmasters tools but that was for 1 day about 4 months ago. Since then no issues. they have quite a few 'blocked URLs' in their robots.txt file, e.g. Disallow: /login, Disallow: /checkout/ but to me these seem normal and not a big issue. We have seen a decrease over the last 12 months in Webmasters Tools of 'total indexed web pages' from 5000 to 2000 which is quite an odd statistic. Summary So all in all I am a tad stumped. We have some duplicate content issues in title tags, perhaps not following best practice in the 301 redirects but other than that I dont see any major on page issues, unless I am missing something in the seriousness of what I have listed.
Finally we have also do a bit of a cull of poor quality links, requesting links to be removed and also submitting a 'disavow' of some really bad links. We do not have a manual penalty though. Thoughts, feedback or comments VERY welcome.0 -
"No index" page still shows in search results and paginated pages shows page 2 in results
I have "no index, follow" on some pages, which I set 2 weeks ago. Today I see one of these pages showing in Google Search Results. I am using rel=next prev on pages, yet Page 2 of a string of pages showed up in results before Page 1. What could be the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Do I use a .org or .co.uk domain to help UK rankings?
Hi Guys, I own to good domains one with a .ORG and the other .CO.UK Can anyone advise which one is best to use to help UK rankings? Or does it not make much difference?? Thanks guys Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
Duplicate WordPress Home Page Issue
I have an issue where I've created a site, (www.tntperformance805.com), using WordPress as a CMS. I enabled the option to use a static page as the home page, and created that page as /home. Well, now the issue that exists is that Google is indexing both www.tntperformance805.com, and www.tntperformance805.com/home/. I've already setup a 301 redirect, pointing /home/ to the main domain, and even have rel=canonical set up automatically, pointing every page to the www version of that particular page. However, Google Webmaster Tools is still reporting the pages as having duplicate page titles and descriptions. I've even had the page removed from Google's cache and index. I'm assuming Google is not considering the 301 redirect, even though it's setup properly. Should I add rel="canonical" href="http://www.tntperformance805.com" /> to the body of the /home/ post, to ensure that it is giving credit to the main domain? I am assuming the page is only redirecting to , as that's the www version, but I thought the 301 redirect would enforce that the search engines should give all credit to the main domain. Thanks in advance for the help everyone. I look forward to some insightful feedback. Best Regards, Matt Dimock
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | National-Positions0