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 appearing instead of subpage
-
Hi,
I have my homepage which has links saying "bike tours and bike tours in France" because in the past I was only doing bike tours in France. I now do tours all over Europe and I have a page about "bike tours in Franc" only.
The issue I have is that my page about "bike tours in France" never appears in the search ranking it is always my homepage that does for tjhe keyword "bike tours in France". My guess is that it is due to the links that my homepage has ?
How could I make sure my France page appears instead of my homepage ?
Thank you,
-
Thank you that confirms my thinking
-
We run into this a lot at the agency I work for. Many of our clients have outstanding sub-pages for their specific services – such as bike tours – but none of those sub-pages ever rank. Their home page ranks for just about any relevant keyword.
We find that 9/10, this is an authority issue. Any backlinks the site has are to the homepage, and the majority of their sub-pages have zero backlinks, therefore very little authority – if any at all.
Our solution to this is do short-term link building campaigns with a focus on the sub-page. Perhaps writing content specifically on bike tours, with a link from the post to the service page, could be helpful. You can even submit your site to local directories, and when appropriate, link to that specific page, opposed to the home page, to gain some authority.
Best of luck, I hope this helps!
-
I think you should improve the content the France page... It's a pleasure to have been useful
-
I got the structure si all I can do now is remove the links that say bike tours france and that go to the homepage or improve the content of the france page ? Correct ?
Thank you for your detailled reply,
-
The structure of a website or a blog is of great importance for its chances to rank in search engines.
1. A decent structure makes sure Google ‘understands’ your site.
The way your website is structured will give Google important clues about where to nd the most important content. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine can understand what your site is about, and how easily it will nd and index the content relevant to your site’s purpose and intent.2 A decent structure makes sure you do not compete with your own content.
On your site, you will probably write multiple pages about similar topics.If we would write eight different articles about bike tours, Google would not know which of the articles or page is the most important one. If you do not solve this by creating a clear site structure, you will be competing with our own articles for a high ranking in Google. Solving this problem requires a good internal linking structure and/or taxonomy structure, resulting in higher rankings. This means that you should pick one article (the flagship article/page/product ) for every major keyword you want to be found for and link to that article from all of your other content about the same keyword.How this apply to your website ?
So you need to create a site structure who reflects that hierarchy. You mentioned that your main products/service is "bike tours Europe".Let's take an example1. bike tours Europe
1.1 bike tours France
1.2 bike tours Spain
1.3 bike tours ItalySo probably in your case your case your homepage is optimized for "bike tours in France"
there are many links pointing to your site with that anchor text (Make a backlink analysis)
if Google is putting your homepage in the first place you need figure out why?Once you do that you need to define your structure in order to make it easy for Google to understand your website.
IF THIS ANSWER WERE USEFUL MARK IT AS A GOOD ANSWER
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
-
Using a Reverse Proxy and 301 redirect to appear Sub Domain as Sub Directory - what are the SEO Risks?
We’re in process to move WordPress blog URLs from subdomains to sub-directory. We aren’t moving blog physically, but using reverse proxy and 301 redirection to do this. Blog subdomain URL is https://blog.example.com/ and destination sub-directory URL is https://www.example.com/blog/ Our main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL site. This is on Windows server. Due to technical reasons, we can’t physically move our WordPress blog to the main website. Following is our Technical Setup Setup a reverse proxy at https://www.example.com/blog/ pointing to https://blog.example.com/ Use a 301 redirection from https://blog.example.com/ to https://www.example.com/blog/ with an exception if a traffic is coming from main WWW domain then it won’t redirect. Thus, we can eliminate infinite loop. Change all absolute URLs to relative URLs on blog Change the sitemap URL from https://blog.example.com/sitemap.xml to https://www.example.com/blog/sitemap.xml and update all URLs mentioned within the sitemap. SEO Risk Evaluation We have individual GA Tracking ID and individual Google Search Console Properties for main website and blog. We will not merge them. Keep them separate as they are. Keeping this in mind, I am evaluating SEO Risks factors Right now when we receive traffic from main website to blog (or vice versa) then it is considered as referral traffic and new cookies are set for Google Analytics. What’s going to happen when its on the same domain? Which type of settings change should I do in Blog’s Google Search Console? (A). Do I need to request “Change of Address” in the Blog’s search console property? (B). Should I re-submit the sitemap? Do I need to re-submit the blog sitemap from the https://www.example.com/ Google Search Console Property? Main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL website, and blog is all about content. So does that impact SEO? Will this dilute SEO link juice or impact on the main website ranking because following are the key SEO Metrices. (A). Main website’s Avg Session Duration is about 10 minutes and bounce rate is around 30% (B). Blog’s Avg Session Duration is 33 seconds and bounce rate is over 92%
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joshibhargav_200 -
Can I add FAQS schema on my homepage?
Hello, can we have the FAQ code on the homepage (staff time)? we have written some questions and answers in the drop-down list on the homepage, and also add the schema code script to one tag of the page, but it does not work!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fbowable0 -
Using H3 before or instead of an H2...
My designer and I have been having an argument: we have a blog with short, 400 words posts. They have an H1 with nice keywords and a catchy title, and then a few subheadings. I don't like making the subheadings H2, because the font looks way too large in Wordpress, so my designer wants to make them all H4s, so the font looks to be a nicer size. Here's my problem with that and why I usually just bold the subheadings: Is it really bad to put a bunch of H4s right under an H1, with not H2's or 3's to separate? I'm reading different arguments on the internet about this and gladly welcome more debate and/or case studies. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | genevieveagar0 -
Baidu Spider appearing on robots.txt
Hi, I'm not too sure what to do about this or what to think of it. This magically appeared in my companies robots.txt file (literally magically appeared/text is below) User-agent: Baiduspider
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby
User-agent: Baiduspider-video
User-agent: Baiduspider-image
Disallow: / I know that Baidu is the Google of China, but I'm not sure why this would appear in our robots.txt all of a sudden. Should I be worried about a hack? Also, would I want to disallow Baidu from crawling my companies website? Thanks for your help,
-Reed0 -
301 v/s 302 Redirection on Homepage (Multilingual)
Hello, Our website: http://www.luxresorts.com currently has a default 302 redirection to http://www.luxresorts.com/en. We would like to do a 301 redirection instead of a 302 to http://www.luxresorts.com. Our concern is that the site is multilingual and we wonder what effect would the 301 redirection have on search engine crawlers and how would this appear on SERP. When a search is done on Google.com, the English version of our website appears and when on Google.FR, the French version appears. Would the 301 redirection change the way our website appear on Google? Grateful if you could help us out in understanding the pros and cons/best practices for our concern. Thanks in advance. Tej Luchmun.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luxresorts0 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
Why does my home page show up in search results instead of my target page for a specific keyword?
I am using Wordpress and am targeting a specific keyword..and am using Yoast SEO if that question comes up.. and I am at 100% as far as what they recommend for on page optimization. The target html page is a "POST" and not a "Page" using Wordpress definitions. Also, I am using this Pinterest style theme here http://pinclone.net/demo/ - which makes the post a sort of "pop-up" - but I started with a different theme and the results below were always the case..so I don't know if that is a factor or not. (I promise .. this is not a clever spammy attempt to promote their theme - in fact parts of it don't even work for me yet so I would not recommend it just yet...) I DO show up on the first page for my keyword.. however.. instead of Google showing the page www.mywebsite.com/this-is-my-targeted-keyword-page.htm Google shows www.mywebsite.com in the results instead. The problem being - if the traffic goes only to my home page.. they will be less likely to stay if they dont find what they want immediately and have to search for it.. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chunkyvittles0