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.
Subpage ranking for homepage keyword
-
Hi all,
May seem like a simple scenario and I might be missing something, but my subpage seems to be ranking for my main homepage keyword.
The subpage PR is 28 and my domain authority is 17, how can I get my main home page to rank instead of the sub page (product page)?
I want to stay away from exact match anchor text links, any suggestions?
-
Hi Phillip,
Try using the On Page Optimization tool under "Search" in your Moz Analytics account to grade each page for the term. It could be that the internal page is better-targeted for the term, even though it's only loosely related.
It's also possible that the subpage has received a high number of links from third parties, although this is fairly rare. There is no chance that the home page is under any sort of filter or penalty from backlink activity (e.g. too many anchors with the target term used as anchor text, pointing at the home page?). Although also not terribly common, Google has been known to penalise pages but not entire websites, based upon the page's backlinks.
You can also try linking to the home page from the subpage and including the target term in the link, but not linking to the subpage from the home page.
-
Hi Phillip
Thanks for your response.
My homepage is ranking no.1 when I do the site: search.
The home page is indexed, and yes sorry I mean PA, the sub page is loosely relevant.
-
Do you have competing title tags, headings, and content between this sub-page and the home page? If they are the same or similar, something on the home page makes it more appealing to rank than your home page. It could be better quality content that is more relevant to the keyword than the home page or it could signify issues with your home page as Philip alluded to.
Limited content or mixed content on the home page could be an issue or it may be technical. Is the home page not loading correctly or loading very slowly? Also, is your home page not ranking for they keyword or is the sub-page just higher in ranking? Does your home page rank for other keywords?
-
For some reason, Google has decided that the interior page is more relevant for the query. There's many reason this might happen...
Go to google.com and do a "site:" search for your domain. site:example.com -- Is your homepage ranking #1 on the SERP? If not, your homepage may not be indexed or might have a manual penalty imposed. Are you 100% sure the homepage is indexed? Do you have Webmaster Tools? Make sure everything is all square in there.
What do you mean by the subpage's PR is 28? Do you mean PA? Is this interior page very relevant for your main keyword or is it just sort of (loosely) relevant?
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
-
Keyword Ranking Fluctuations
Hi Guys I am currently working on a website where one of the keyword targets is fluctuating. The keyword is fluctuating between page 2 and page 5. What makes this strange is that we are not experiencing the issue with any other keyword targets. They are all ranking fine. It is only 1 keyword. The keyword target happens to be the main homepage keyword target - not sure if this makes a difference? The homepage targets 2 keyword e.g. Business Offices & Accessories. The homepage ranks perfectly fine for e.g. Business Accessories but is fluctuating for e.g. Business Offices! Very strange. What makes it even stranger - the keyword variations of the fluctuating keyword e.g. office for business - these variations are all fine and not fluctuating. Its only 1 keyword. If anyone has any ideas or feedback that would be great! Thanks, Duncan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page
Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Google cache is showing my UK homepage site instead of the US homepage and ranking the UK site in US
Hi There, When I check the cache of the US website (www.us.allsaints.com) Google returns the UK website. This is also reflected in the US Google Search Results when the UK site ranks for our brand name instead of the US site. The homepage has hreflang tags only on the homepage and the domains have been pointed correctly to the right territories via Google Webmaster Console.This has happened before in 26th July 2015 and was wondering if any had any idea why this is happening or if any one has experienced the same issueFDGjldR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adzhass0 -
How to measure traffic for a keyword
Sitting in Country A I want to see how much traffic a particular keyword receives in Country B. Whats the best way to do it? Also, will the search results differ if I am analyzing the above sitting in Country A viz-a-viz Country B. In other words, will the IP of the country I am making the search from play a role in the results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__0 -
Ranking on google but not Bing?
Any reason why I could be ranking for Google but not Bing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Google Ranking Generally in Germany - Keywords & Umlauts
Hi Mozzers, I was hoping i could get some advice/opinions on a website ranking problem i have been working on, in particular one of the pages. This is our German language website which is hosted from Germany and a flaunt German speaking member of staff from our German office moderates the text content of the website for us.Our website seems to get good traffic ,visitor navigation and conversions. One of the keywords i focus building around is Schallpegelmessgerät which is one way of basically saying Sound level meter in German. The keyword uses an umlaut which i cannot use in the URL, but google is picking up and putting into the snippets, but apart from that our on-page optimization is good according to the moz tool. I have been trying to improve our content and we post many blog articles around the topic/keyword but google.de seems to choose not to even display this on the first couple of pages and sometimes ranks our blog articles around the third page. We are even been outranked by some low quality cheap online shop websites some of which with low quality content and low page and domain authorities. I had accepted this but after looking at bing.de and doing a search i find our page in the top 5 results, i understand that google and bing's algorhythms are different but just struggling to get my head around it all. Here is our website & page - http://www.cirrusresearch.de/produkte/schallpegelmessgerat/ Any advice on this situation would be greatly appreciated, thank you very much for reading this James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0 -
Exact keyword URL or not?
Hi all, I have a quick question about the proper use of permalinks. Let's say that I have a website about sports and I want to create an internal page dedicated to shoes. I know that the keyword "shoe" has 15.000 monthly visits, while the keyword "shoes" has 1.000 monthly visits. How do I have to name the internal page? http://www.example.com/shoe or http://www.example.com/shoes (with a final 's')? I would think that by naming the URL http://www.example.com/shoes, the search engine would consider that page for the keywords "shoe" and "shoes", but I am not sure about it. Should I create a URL that only focuses on one specific keyword ("shoe", in this example) or a URL that may encompass more than one keyword ("shoe" and "shoes")? I hope this is clear. Thank you for your time and help. All best, Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Sudden rank drop for 1 keyword
A page of mine (http://loginhelper.com/networks/facebook-login/) was ranking in the top 10 for keyword (facebook login) and has been for at least 2 months, moving between 5th and 10th. Suddenly in the last 3 days the rank for the keyword dropped from 7th to 46th, yet none of the other keywords have been affected (they target other pages) and their ranks have continued to improve. I am trying to figure out what caused this sudden drop in the ranking of 1 page (the page has quality mainly text based content and isn't in the least bit shallow or spammy) I have been thinking perhaps a crawl or server error may be to cause leaving the page temporarily unavailable or with a big load time... Otherwise what could cause one page to drop so much so quickly whilst other pages improved their rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netboost0