Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Homepage outranked by sub pages - reason for concern?
-
Hey All,
trying to figure out how concerned I should be about this. So here is the scoop, would appreciate your thoughts.
We have several eCommerce websites that have been affected by Panda, do to content from manufacturers and lack of original content. We have been working hard to write our own descriptions and are seeing an increase in traffic again. We have also been writing blogs since February and are getting a lot of visits to them.
Here is the problem, our blog pages are now outranking our homepage when you type in site:domain-name
Is this a problem? our home page does not show up until you are 3 pages in. However when you type in just our domain name in google as a search it does show up in position one with sitelinks under it.
This is happening across both of our sites. Is this a cause for concern or just natural due to our blogs being more popular than our homepage.
Thanks!
Josh
-
Is your blog hosted on a subdomain?
Personally I have noticed that Panda is sitewide but the subdomains might remain unaffected. In our case, our ecommerce site with 6,000+ pages got affected but the blog (subdomain) actually increased in traffic due to better content, more social signals and other factors.
-
Thanks for the response. It is nice to hear from someone else who has the same type of site and sees the same thing. Appreciate the tip and the response.
-
I would be concerned if the home page didn't appear, but I'm not sure whether it matters that it is getting outranked by blog pages. We have eCommerce sites and added blogs to a couple of them around February. Most of the time the blogs seem to support the rankings of the pages they are written to funnel traffic towards, but sometimes they will outrank them. Google seems to love the fresh content, but when blogs outrank other more relevant pages I find there is usually an issue with on-page optimisation.
-
Please take the time to read this page, it has a calculator you can play with also, it will make things clearer I'm sure
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html -
Hi Joshua.
There is no concern at all with internal pages outranking your home page. It can be perfectly natural.
Let's say you have a site about...well, almost anything. Today you perform an interview with the President and talk about...well, almost anything. You publish that interview on your site. Overnight that interview will probably attract thousands of links causing that page to be the most linked page on your site. There is nothing wrong with that result.
You can try to sculpt your PR within your site a bit. You can say hey, I have a ton of PR on this one page and I want to move some of it to my latest or most profitable products. In that case, you can add a sidebar to the page with "latest products" or "featured products". You may also be able to sneak in a few anchor text links within the content itself depending on how the interview progressed.
A video which may help: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qigo05nAqKw
-
Thanks Alan,
that helps and you might have pointed something there. Our site has lots of links on each page and each page basically links to the same pages which would keep everything pretty even. Structure is something that we are working on. I wonder if that is part of the problem.
-
When searching for site:mydomain.com i also asume that it is in order of rank, but i cant say i know that for a fact.
I would look at my internal linking
do all pages link back to home page, do they liink back to mydomain.com recommended or mydomain.com/default.htm
do you have a full sitemap on every page, I recommend not.
If every page links to every other page, this keeps link juice even on every page, when really you want to give your home page or landing pages prominence.
The best structure is flat, home page links to every page, and every page links back to home page and landing pages if you have them.
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
-
Should search pages be indexed?
Hey guys, I've always believed that search pages should be no-indexed but now I'm wondering if there is an argument to index them? Appreciate any thoughts!
Technical SEO | | RebekahVP0 -
Indexed pages
Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers... Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages Google search using site command: 468 results MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500) Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz1 -
<sub>& <sup>tags, any SEO issues?</sup></sub>
Hi - the content on our corporate website is pretty technical, and we include chemical element codes in the text that users would search on (like S02, C02, etc.) A lot of times our engineers request that we list the codes correctly, with a <sub>on the last number. Question - does adding this code into the keyword affect SEO? The code would look like SO<sub>2</sub>.</sub> Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Jenny10 -
Low page impressions
Hey there MOZ Geniuses; While checking my webmaster data I noticed that almost all my Google impressions are generated by the home page, most other content pages are showing virtually no impression data <50 (the home page is showing around 1500 - a couple of the pages are in the 150-200 range). the site has been up for about 8 months now. Traffic on average is about 500 visitors, but I'm seeing very little entry other then the home page. Checking the number Sitemap section 27 of 30 are index Webmaster tools are not reporting errors Webmaster keyword impressions are also extremely low 164 keywords with the highest impression count of 79 and dropping from there. MOZ is show very few minor issues although it says that it crawled 10k pages? -- we only have 30 or so. The answer seems obvious, Google is not showing my content ... the question is why and what steps can I take to analyze this? Could there be a possibility of some type of penalty? I welcome all your suggestions: The site is www.calibersi.com
Technical SEO | | VanadiumInteractive0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Splitting Page Authority with two URLs for the same page.
Hello guys, My website is currently holding two different URLs for the same page and I am under the impression such set up is dividing my Page Authority and Link Juice. We currently have the following page with both URLs below: www.wbresearch.com/soldiertechnologyusa/home.aspx
Technical SEO | | JoaoPdaCosta-WBR
www.wbresearch.com/soldiertechnologyusa/ Analysing the page authority and backlinks I identified that we are splitting the amount of backlinks (links from sites, social media and therefore authority). "/home.aspx"
PA: 67
Linking Root Domains: 52
Total Links: 272 "/"
PA: 64
Linking Root Domains: 29
Total Links: 128 I am under the impression that if the URLs were the same we would maximise our backlinks and therefore page authority. My Question: How can I fix this? Should I have a 301 redirect from the page "/" to the "/home.aspx" therefore passing the authority and link juice of “/” directly to “/homes.aspx”? Trying to gather thoughts and ideas on this, suggestions are much appreciated? Thanks!0 -
Tutorial For Moving Blogger Blog From Sub-Domain to Sub-Directory
Does anyone know where I can find a tutorial for moving a blogger.com (blogspot) blog that's currently hosted on a subdomain (i.e. blog.mysite.com) to a subdirectory (i.e. mysite.com/blog) with the current version of blogger? I'm working on transferring my blogger blogs over to wordpress, and to do so without losing link juice or traffic, this is one of the steps I have to take. There's plenty of tutorials that address moving from blogspot.mysite.com to wordpress and I've even found a few that address moving from blog.mysite.com (hosted on blogger) to a root domain mysite.com. However, I need to move from blog.mysite.com (blogger) to mysite.com/blog/ - subdirectory (wordpress). Anyone who knows how to do this or can point me in the right direction?? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ChaseH0
