PR of homepage when other pages have more lniks
-
This is going to sound like such a newbie question. I don't know how I've been doing SEO all this time and haven't come across the answer.
It's usually true that a homepage will have the most backlinks, but what if it doesn't? What if an internal page has more links? Is it possible for an internal page to have a higher PR than a homepage?
Additionally, if I do on-page SEO for many internal pages of my site, will it only help those particular pages or will it give the whole site a boost, thus making the homepage rank higher in the SERPS?
-
Its not just from backlinks. I've got blogs where the homepage is PR1 but posts are PR3, due to social signals and shares of the post. This seems to be happening more recently.
-
No Panda problems. It's a legitimate business whose website I'm just trying to make as optimized as possible. www.stadriemblems.com
Most of our product pages only have about a paragraph of text in them like this one. I was hoping by adding five or six paragraphs of helpful information to all of those pages like this one that Google would consider the whole site more helpful rather than only the page.
I mean, individual pages have to count in some way toward the quality of the overall site in Google's eyes. I've always heard that it's a good thing to have a lot of indexed pages--as long as they're good. So if it's only individual pages that matter, then what's the difference between a site that has 1,000 quality pages vs. a two page site as far as home page ranking goes?
Is having 1,000 indexed pages only a good thing because you have 1,000 chances to rank for 1,000 different terms, and has no bearing on the homepage?
-
Great points Doug.
-
If those pages you write attract their own inbound links then the link-juice that flows into your site, into those pages, will also flow to the other pages on your site giving other pages on your site a boost too.
Don't just think of link juice as something that flows down from your home page.
Adding more (quality) content will also help your website rank for all those lovely long-tail keywords.
Just remember that it's not JUST about links/link-juice. The pages should have a purpose and be written for the audience you're targeting. Make sure you're thinking about answering their questions rather than your own, and provide them with the information they need.
-
Ingeneral (I have not seen your site or know what problems it might have), if your site was hit by panda then adding great content to all your pages would probably help your homepage rank better for your targeted keywords. However, I don't know if you are having a panda problem or just need to do more link building to your homepage and optimize it. A panda penalty can reduce the rankings of all the pages on a site.
Also, adding quality content that helps the user is never the wrong choice to make. However, if you are trying to get your homepage ranking better for a specific phrase and you don't have penalties/filters on the page. Then I would probably focus on link building and doing on page SEO for that page and funneling the link juice from the other high PR pages on the site to my homepage more efficiently.
I hope this helps.
Thanks,
Jason
-
So if I devote a lot of time to adding a lot of quality content to my site--lots of text and helpful information about our products, Google doesn't view the site in general as better and more informative, thus ranking the home page higher? All that extra text helps is just the page it's on?
-
Marisa,
Yes, it is possible for an internal page to have higher PR than the hompage. Sometimes a site will host a viral piece of content (infographic, quiz or an awesome blog post etc..) that will dramatically increase that pages PR. This is not a bad thing, but can be a very good asset.
On to your last question, depending on how you have your internal link structured the link juice coming into the site will help all your pages rank more aggressively in the SERPs. ingeneral onpage SEO will only help the page that you are optimizing ranking more aggressively. However, if you are optimizing your internal links to other pages, this will help those pages rank better too. So in short, it depends on what you are doing. If you are just optimizing the Title tag, meta description, H1 tag and keywords on the page. You are really only helping that page rank better. However, if you are linking to other pages from within the body copy and optimizing your internal links to pass more juice. That will help all your pages rank better.
Remember that google doesn't rank site, it ranks pages.
I hope this helps.
Thanks,
Jason
-
All those deep pages that have lots of back links also pass on page rank via their links too and I bet that in most cases pages on a website have one or more links back to the homepage...
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
-
Canonical Page Question
Hi, I have a question relation to Canonical pages That i need clearing up. I am not sure that my bigcommere website is correctly configured and just wanted clarification from someone in the know. Take this page for example https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/ Canonical link is https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/ The Rel="next" link is https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/?sort=bestselling&page=2 and this page has a canonical tag as rel='canonical' href='https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/?page=2' /> Is this correct as above and working as it should or should the canonical tag for the second (pagination page) https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/?page=2 in our source code be saying rel='canonical' href='https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/' />
Technical SEO | | oceanstorm0 -
Why is our login page ranked higher than our homepage?
Hello everyone, When you search "ProtonMail", our Login page always ranks #1 while our homepage ranks #2. We're unsure why this is happening. The PA for our homepage is higher than the login page, and the login page itself basically has zero content except for a login form. We don't want to put the login page on robots.txt, we want to do our best to preserve it so that people can login. However it still does not make sense to us how the login page ranks higher, even though it has a lesser PA. I'd appreciate any help or advice you might have. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | kevinzh0 -
Big page of clients - links to individual client pages with light content - not sure if canonical or no-follow - HELP
Not sure what best practice here is: http://www.5wpr.com/clients/ Is this is a situation where I'm best off adding canonical tags back to the main clients page, or to the practice area each client falls under? No-following all these links and adding canonical? No-follow/No-index all client pages? need some advice here...
Technical SEO | | simplycary0 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content Crawl Diagnostics
I have Pages with Duplicate Page Content in my Crawl Diagnostics Tell Me How Can I solve it Or Suggest Me Some Helpful Tools. Thanks
Technical SEO | | nomyhot0 -
How many keyword per page
how many keyword per page will optimize my page to list on best rank in Google search ?
Technical SEO | | krisanantha0 -
Duplicate page content
Hello, My site is being checked for errors by the PRO dashboard thing you get here and some odd duplicate content errors have appeared. Every page has a duplicate because you can see the page and the page/~username so... www.short-hairstyles.com is the same as www.short-hairstyles.com/~wwwshor I don't know if this is a problem or how the crawler found this (i'm sure I have never linked to it). But I'd like to know how to prevent it in case it is a problem if anyone knows please? Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
What to do when you want the category page and landing page to be the same thing?
I'm working on structuring some of my content better and I have a dilemma. I'm using wordpress and I have a main category called "Therapy." Under therapy I want to have a few sub categories such as "physical therapy" "speech therapy" "occupational therapy" to separate the content. The url would end up being mysite/speech-therapy. However, those are also phrases I want to create a landing page for. So I'd like to have a page like mysite.com/speech-therapy that I could optimize and help people looking for those terms find some of the most helpful content on our site for those certain words. I know I can't have 2 urls that are the same, but I'm hoping someone can give me some feedback on the best way to about this. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Discrepency between # of pages and # of pages indexed
Here is some background: The site in question has approximately 10,000 pages and Google Webmaster shows that 10,000 urls(pages were submitted) 2) Only 5,500 pages appear in the Google index 3) Webmaster shows that approximately 200 pages could not be crawled for various reasons 4) SEOMOZ shows about 1,000 pages that have long URL's or Page Titles (which we are correcting) 5) No other errors are being reported in either Webmaster or SEO MOZ 6) This is a new site launched six weeks ago. Within two weeks of launching, Google had indexed all 10,000 pages and showed 9,800 in the index but over the last few weeks, the number of pages in the index kept dropping until it reached 5,500 where it has been stable for two weeks. Any ideas of what the issue might be? Also, is there a way to download all of the pages that are being included in that index as this might help troubleshoot?
Technical SEO | | Mont0