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.
When doing a site search my homepage comes up second. Does that matter?
-
When I do a site: search the homepage comes up second. Does this matter?
-
Hi there, just checking in do see if you have an update for us.

Christy
-
http://germanhausbarn.com/ Here is the homepage. It is more informational then anything.
-
Sounds good. Let us know how things work out.

-
I am in the process of redoing our homepage. We actually do not have a lot of content on our homepage and virtually no keywords. That should be remedied in the next few weeks and we will see if that solves the problem.
-
What's the purpose of the home page? Is it purely navigational? Does it have any unique content on it?
Hard to assess whether there's a real problem or not and what that problem might be without taking a look at the site.
-
We've come across this situation a number of times. I have a very strong feeling that your homepage has over optimised anchor text. If you want to post or PM me the URL I can take a further look but the most common reason I see for this (over & over) is Panda (over optimisation, thin content, poor titles, incorrect canonicals, or anchor spam.)
It can also depend on your site & keywords. If you have an seo company for instance and a page at yoursite.com/seo, that page may rank better for your domain if it also includes the word SEO. Let me give an example because no matter how I write that, it's confusing.
If your domain is ouragency.com and your /seo page comes up first, chances are it's something I mentioned above.
However, if your domain is seoagency.com and your /seo page comes up first, it may just be that the /seo page is better optimised for the term.
-
It is just a basic site for a non-profit. Everything seems to be ok, I just thought it was weird. It looks like the homepage doesn't have an optimized enough title so I think that might be it.
-
I don't think it matters, but without knowing more about your site it's hard to say for certain.
See this article: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-site-command-ranking-12858.html
What's more important is that you have the right page getting visibility for the right keywords/topics so that you provide the best user experience and increase your chances of converting those visitors into customers/followers.
What page is coming up first? Can you make any guesses as to why?
What I have use the site: search for is to look at the top 10 pages and assess how well these reflect the products/services/topics for which the site wants to be associated with.
-
It isn't a keyword search it is a site:search. I have a copy of a site audit and it says that the homepage should come up first, but it doesn't.
-
Could you provide URLs for that?
I also dont' quite follow you - say you're looking for "plumber in Taos" -- do you mean that your site comes up 2nd?
-- if so good!Do you mean if you're searching for "Bills Plumbing Services" (your company name) and that comes up second?
- if so, then what comes up first?
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
-
Google Image Search - Is there a way to influence the related icons at the top of the image search results?
Google recently added related icons at the top of the image search results page. Some of the icons may be unrelated to the search. Are there any best practices to influence what is positioned in the related image icons section? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaredBroussard1 -
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
Using the same image across the site?
Hi just wondering i'm using the same image across 20 pages which are optimized for SEO purposes. I was wondering is there issues with this from SEO standpoint? Will Google devalue the page because the same image is being used? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowork2140 -
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 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Multiple sites in the same niche
Hi All A question regarding multiple sites in the same niche... If I have say 10 sites all targetting the same niche yet all on different C-class IPs with different hosts, registrars, whois data and ages can I use the same template, or will Google discern a pattern? Basically I have developed a WordPress template which I want to use on the sites albeit with different logos / brand colours. NB/ All of the 10 sites will have unique, original content and they will NOT be interlinked
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielparry1 -
Optimize a Classifieds Site
Hi, I have a classifieds website and would like to optimize it. The issues/questions I have: A Classifieds site has, say, 500 cities. Is it better to create separate subdomains for each city (http://city_name.site.com) or subdirectory (http://site.com/city_name)? Now in each city, there will be say 50 categories. Now these 50 categories are common across all the cities. Hence, the layout and content will be the same with difference of latest ads from each city and name of the city and the urls pointing to each category in the relevant city. The site architecture of a classifieds site is highly prone to have major content which is not really a duplicate content. What is the best way to deal with this situation? I have been hit by Panda in April 2011 with traffic going down 50%. However, the traffic since then has been around same level. How to best handle the duplicate content penalty in case with site like a classifieds site. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ketan90 -
Search Engine Pingler
Hello everyone, it's me again 😉 I've just got a Pro membership on SeoMoz and I am full of questions. A few days ago I found very interesting tool called: Search Engine Pingler And description of it was like this: Your website or your page was published a long time, but you can not find it on google. Because google has not index your site. Tool Search engine pingler will assist for you. It will ping the URL of your Page up more than 80 servers of google and other search engines. Inform to the search engine come to index your site. So my question is that tool really helps to increase the indexation of the link by search engine like Google, if not, please explain what is a real purpose of it. Thank you to future guru who can give a right answer 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smokin_ace0