About page showing in SERPS instead of Home page
-
I launched a daycare website a few months ago. For some reason Google does not like my home page. I know there is a lot more I can do to promote the website in general, but I can't figure out why, when I search for the brand name, the about page shows up followed by a few external listings, but no result for the home page anywhere. It is indeed indexed (checked site: and tried searching for an exact phrase in quotes and ran all the tests in webmaster tools), but it just isn't showing up.
Can anyone see anything I'm missing? If you google "hello world daycare" (in victoria bc, canada) you'll see the about page for helloworlddaycare.com.
Any help you can provide to solve this mystery would be much appretiated!
-
Ok, I guess it's maily a matter of doing general domain wide seo then and being patient. Still not entirely sure why a subpage would be considered higher authority as the main page all other things being equal, but thanks for the answers!
-
Hi -
You will have to earn some authority for the domain to be able to rank the home page first. Since there is almost no authority on site, google believes that the about page is better.
What i'd do?
-
Get the brand out in the market and earn some back links (pure white hat on authority sites) on branded keyword
-
Something to consider -- you consider the canonical with "/" in the end for homepage, whereas your site doesn't show up that way. I'd propose you either trail it with "/" in both places or not. But be consistent.
I'm sure this will work. It's just matter of time.
- Kiruba
-
-
The canonical tags look fine. I don't think that's the issue here. I think this is just a newer domain that doesn't have a lot of links. When I popped the site into Majestic SEO the About, Blog and Home Page had the, or similar citation flow. Though it's not the entire link profile, that's something to think about.
There are some general things that could possibly be done to improve the site itself. There's a lot of different CSS files. There's also inline styling. If it can be done, it would be a good idea to get rid of the inline styles and combine/minify the CSS rules.
Plus the text to code ratio is pretty low all around. You may want to consider ways to add more content, or reduce the amount of code. This isn't a huge deal, and there isn't an exact percentage, but with few links to go on - the next consideration is on-page content.
So, I would say try to get more niche/local directory links pointed at the home page and this will eventually work itself out. I wouldn't jump the gun and attempt to remove the about page. Plus, I'm fairly certain demotion is related to site links in that would show under the domain in organic search.
-
Have you implemented Rel=canonical tags properly? That might be a contributing factor.
Another thing you might try is going into Google Webmaster Tools and demoting the About page. Sometimes that will help push other pages higher up in priority for SERP.
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
-
Video page duplicates (that aren't really duplicates)
Hi. My company has a 1000 videos, each of the videos appear on their own page that follows the same template. The title is of course different / videos linked to / etc. Google is reporting them as "duplicate content". What should I do to differentiate these pages enough so that google can recognized that they are different pages?.
Image & Video Optimization | | adamorn0 -
Tips for improving google places page
link here When I started working on this page he had multiple incorrect listings. I removed the incorrect ones and created this page. It has been confirmed via postcard and up for several months now. I have the profile filled out to 100% completion. Yet it does not show up very high in local map results. A ton of the business that do show up higher have profiles that are incomplete. Many of them show their address when they do not serve customers at their location. So it is a bit aggravating. Any suggestions to make this profile rank higher? I have been creating more citations through whitespark and working on the actual site itself.
Image & Video Optimization | | Atomicx0 -
Off-Page Local SEO for a Home-Based Businesses?
What are some ideas for optimizing for off-page local SEO when you're working with home-based businesses that don't necessarily want to share their physical address, and using a PO box is not an option for major local SEO directories?
Image & Video Optimization | | Inturact0 -
Does google places mind listing cities on the home page
Hello, A site in our industry is listing a bunch of cities on their home page and ranking for them. Like "Our dog training facility provides services to dogs in city1,city2,city3,city4,city5,city6 state" where the cities and states are relatively in their area. It's working organically, will this confuse google places? Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Local SEO Issue: Google Places Listing on Page 8
Hello, I'm having an issue with a client's Google Places listing. It's showing on page 8 for one of the main keyword terms but their main site is on page 1. Having looked into competitors' places listings ranking above, I've ruled out the following; lack of citations inconsistent citations incomplete profile incorrect category listing details not matching places landing page incorrect location and any form of keyword stuffing Other places listings ranking above have fewer citations, incomplete profiles, details inconsistent with their main site, one is no longer trading as a business and one has no website! In the past, our client had had two listings simultaneously but we addressed this waaaay back. Is it possible we could still be getting punished? I'm at a bit of a loss otherwise. Any thoughts would be hugely appreciated. Thankyou!
Image & Video Optimization | | jasarrow0 -
Setting Up Localized City Pages and Duplicate Content issues
We are setting up landing pages on our site that will cater to specific cities, in an effort to be more relevant to the users in those cities and also capture more localized traffic. These regional pages will each have a unique paragraph at the top, but below that is a sentence or two about each product line that would be difficult to rewrite with quality more than 10 - 15 times. Would the paragraph at the top of the page be enough unique content (about 4-5 sentences)? Obviously the duplicate content wouldn't be to my advantage, but is it really necessary to rewrite the other sentences about the product lines? What's the most efficient method to complete this project in a whitehat fashion?
Image & Video Optimization | | InetAll0 -
Google Maps/Places in Organic SERP
This question is regarding having a Google Places snippet consisting of your business location and opening hours appearing in Google SERP when the business name is searched for. One of our competitors who has a location within their name e.g. 'Widgets of Oxford' have a Google Places snippet appear on the RHS of the search results (where Google Ads usually go) when searched for. We are trying to replicate this for our business but cannot seem to find any information relating to doing this apart from that this only appears for them as they have a location in their name. This is because we see a similar snippet when we search for our business name in the format "OurBusinessName in OurLocation). Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.
Image & Video Optimization | | jannkuzel0 -
What are some effective ways to take up SERP real estate?
Hey Guys, I was wondering if you've seen or practiced some effective ways to take up real estate in the SERPS. Ideally I'd like to see more results from my own domain although I realize that G seems to only display 3 for any single domain. I'm looking for creative ways to take up more real estate other than subdomains. I recently saw a municipal website with 4 results (1 being a PDF) which suprised me. I have a couple in my head but what's worked best for you?
Image & Video Optimization | | reegs0