Why is my home page ranking much higher than my collection page?
-
Hi everyone,
Why is my client's home page ranking high for a certain keyword phrase rather than a collection page I have which is well optimised for this keyword?
The collection page is on the 10th SERPs page. I did see there were keywords used in the footer of page and the keyword was also used in some intro text on the home page so I removed the keyword from these two places nearly 2 weeks ago and requested google to reindex both the collection page and home page and I've not seen any improvement of the collection page's ranking in SERPs.
I also changed the meta description and meta title as the ctr was poor but there wasn''t that many impressions either.
It is a competitive keyword organically so maybe the collection page's authority is just not good enough compared to the competitors hence why they are choosing the home page as it has higher page authority however this still is not helpful to searchers who land on home page.
Does anyone have any ideas of what else I can do to get google to rank the ocllection page higher for the keyword instead of home page?
-
Any ideas on my issue above please?
-
Hi Ross,
I did remove the keyword from the home page 10 days ago and both pages have been indexed since but the collection page is still not being ranked for that keyword even though it's in the meta title, h1 tag, page and meta descriptions. It ranks for other similar keywords but not the one it's focused on but still the home page is ranking for it instead.
Do you have any other ideas of what might cause this?
-
Yes, that's exactly what you want to do. Remove the keywords from meta tags, headings and on-page from your home page.
Ross
-
Hi Ross,
I think I understand you but wouldn't removing the keyword from the homepage where it was in three places be deoptimising that page for the keyword in question?
-
You need to look at the number of backlinks and unique referring domains since referring domains are more important than the number of backlinks. You should look into your Google Search Console as well. It is possible that Ahrefs does not see all your backlinks. You might rank your home page without having any keyword rich hyperlinks/anchor texts. You need to deoptimize your home page and build more links to the collection page to rank collection page .
Ross
-
Hi Ross,
It does have more backlinks than collection page which I think is normal because it's home page. However, when I looked at backlink profile for the HOMEPAGE URL in Ahrefs it shows there are 519 backlinks directing to home page but if I look at the ones that are tareting the keyword in question there are only 2 backlinks focused on the target keyword that the collection page targets AND these links are from directory sites which are not good backlinks.
-
Hi there,
Most likely your home page has more backlinks than your collection page. You need to check your backlink profile to see a clear picture of why it is happening.
Ross
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
-
Pillar pages and blog pages
Hello, I was watching this video about pillar pages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db3TpDZf_to and tried to apply it to my self but find it impossible to do (but maybe I am looking at it the wrong way). Let's say I want to rank on "Normandy bike tou"r. I created a pillar page about "Normandy bike tour" what would be the topics of the subpages boosting that pillar page. I know that it should be questions people have but in the tourism industry they don't have any, they just want us to make them dream !! I though about doing more general blog pages about things such as : Places to rent a bike in Normandy or in XYZ city ? ( related to biking) Or the landing sites in Normandy ? (not related to biking) Is it the way to do it, what do you recommend ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
301 Externally Linked, But Non-Producing Pages, To Productive Pages Needing Links?
I'm working on a site that has some non-productive pages without much of an upside potential, but that are linked-to externally. The site also has some productive pages, light in external links, in a somewhat related topic. What do you think of 301ing the non-productive pages with links to the productive pages without links in order to give them more external link love? Would it make much of a difference? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
How to rank product pages?
Hi guys, Please advice me on something improving my product pages ranking. We are doing well for head terms, categories but not ranking for product pages. We have issues with product pages which I am think is hard to tackle. For instance we have duplicate products (different colors), duplicate content internally (colors) and from manufacturer websites. Product pages linked from sub-category i.e. Home > Category > Sub-Category (20 per page) using pagination for next 20 and so on. Product pages linked internally via widgets that says other Similar products, featured products etc. Another issue with our product pages is that we are using third party reviews platform and whenever users add reviews to product pages this platform creates an hyperlink to different anchors which is not relevant to product. Example - http://goo.gl/NUG652 Can somebody please give some advice on how to improve rankings for product pages. writing unique content for thousands of pages is not possible. Even our competitor not writing unique content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webmaster_SEO0 -
Getting a Home Page to Rank
Hi Mozzers, My question specifically has to do with optimizing a home page for specific keywords, but still keeping the design clean and not cluttered.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
How do you guys prefer to go about it? Currently our home page only really gets traffic for branded keywords (though we do have some rankings for real keywords showing in GWT which I can't really explain). I know how to write content for specific long-tail keywords, but we want to keep our homepage very clean, not filled with gobs of text. Right now my main plan is to display content under a "Read More.." button.
What do you pros suggest? Thanks!0 -
We recently fixed a Meta Refresh that was affecting our home page - But something still seems wrong. Any suggestions?
We recently fixed a meta refresh issue on our home page. Our store URL: http://www.ccisolutions.com had a meta refresh on it that was going to: www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain The meta refresh is now gone, however there still seem to be some problems: Our IT Director has not been successful in trying to make www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain 301 redirect to http://www.ccisolutions.com - so I believe we now have a duplicate content issue If you look at both of these URLs in OSE, you will see that www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain is getting credit for almost all of the Internal Followed Links, while http://www.ccisolutions.com is getting all the credit for External Followed links. Why doesn't http://www.ccisolutions.com show the same number of Internal Followed Links? I realize this is more of a developer/webmaster question and would be very appreciative of any suggestions or advice. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Why are new pages not being indexed, and old pages (now in robots.txt) remain in the index?
I currently have a site that was recently restructured, causing much of its content to be reposted, creating new URL's for each page. To avoid duplicates, all of the existing pages were added to the robots file. That said, it has now been over a week - I know Google has recrawled the site - and when I search for term X, it is stil the old page that is ranking, with the new one nowhere to be seen. I'm assuming it's a cached version, but why are so many of the old pages still appearing in the index? Furthermore, all "tags" pages (it's a Q&A site, like this one) were also added to the robots a few months ago, yet I think they are all still appearing in the index. Anyone got any ideas about why this is happening, and how I can get my new pages indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corp08030 -
Category Pages - Canonical, Robots.txt, Changing Page Attributes
A site has category pages as such: www.domain.com/category.html, www.domain.com/category-page2.html, etc... This is producing duplicate meta descriptions (page titles have page numbers in them so they are not duplicate). Below are the options that we've been thinking about: a. Keep meta descriptions the same except for adding a page number (this would keep internal juice flowing to products that are listed on subsequent pages). All pages have unique product listings. b. Use canonical tags on subsequent pages and point them back to the main category page. c. Robots.txt on subsequent pages. d. ? Options b and c will orphan or french fry some of our product pages. Any help on this would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Troyville0 -
Will swear words present on my pages affect my rankings?
Hi There, I am in the process of formulating a listing policy for my site and I'm not sure whether I should add something in there for swear words. My site is an adult site and swear words come with the territory, unfortunately. Will user generated content with swear words affect my ranking? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith0