Why is my home page ranking much higher than my collection page?
-
Hi everyone,
Why is my client's home page ranking high for a certain keyword phrase rather than a collection page I have which is well optimised for this keyword?
The collection page is on the 10th SERPs page. I did see there were keywords used in the footer of page and the keyword was also used in some intro text on the home page so I removed the keyword from these two places nearly 2 weeks ago and requested google to reindex both the collection page and home page and I've not seen any improvement of the collection page's ranking in SERPs.
I also changed the meta description and meta title as the ctr was poor but there wasn''t that many impressions either.
It is a competitive keyword organically so maybe the collection page's authority is just not good enough compared to the competitors hence why they are choosing the home page as it has higher page authority however this still is not helpful to searchers who land on home page.
Does anyone have any ideas of what else I can do to get google to rank the ocllection page higher for the keyword instead of home page?
-
Any ideas on my issue above please?
-
Hi Ross,
I did remove the keyword from the home page 10 days ago and both pages have been indexed since but the collection page is still not being ranked for that keyword even though it's in the meta title, h1 tag, page and meta descriptions. It ranks for other similar keywords but not the one it's focused on but still the home page is ranking for it instead.
Do you have any other ideas of what might cause this?
-
Yes, that's exactly what you want to do. Remove the keywords from meta tags, headings and on-page from your home page.
Ross
-
Hi Ross,
I think I understand you but wouldn't removing the keyword from the homepage where it was in three places be deoptimising that page for the keyword in question?
-
You need to look at the number of backlinks and unique referring domains since referring domains are more important than the number of backlinks. You should look into your Google Search Console as well. It is possible that Ahrefs does not see all your backlinks. You might rank your home page without having any keyword rich hyperlinks/anchor texts. You need to deoptimize your home page and build more links to the collection page to rank collection page .
Ross
-
Hi Ross,
It does have more backlinks than collection page which I think is normal because it's home page. However, when I looked at backlink profile for the HOMEPAGE URL in Ahrefs it shows there are 519 backlinks directing to home page but if I look at the ones that are tareting the keyword in question there are only 2 backlinks focused on the target keyword that the collection page targets AND these links are from directory sites which are not good backlinks.
-
Hi there,
Most likely your home page has more backlinks than your collection page. You need to check your backlink profile to see a clear picture of why it is happening.
Ross
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Recommend Layout Page (home, categories or section, individual page)
Hello Could you please share with me your advice and recommendations on how to design a SEO layout (H1, Image, body text, etc). I need to give instructions to our website designer. I would like to see some examples. We are going to work with wordpress and visual composer. I really appreciate your help and time Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GHSCostaRica0 -
Home page ranks for most keywords with no SEO
Hi Guys, The keyword I am trying to rank is on seperate page with its own Optimization in place. However the HOME page of website starts ranking for that keywords . The keyword is mentioned on Home page Just once in content description, that's all. What should be my ideal strategy. Deleting the Sub Page, will that improve the SEO of my home page and improve the Rank for that keyword ? Also I can see my Own YELP pages rank better than the actual website for few terms . Any way around this ? A Part from building links to page ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aus00071 -
Why is Google ranking irrelevant / not preferred pages for keywords?
Over the past few months we have been chipping away at duplicate content issues. We know this is our biggest issue and is working against us. However, it is due to this client also owning the competitor site. Therefore, product merchandise and top level categories are highly similar, including a shared server. Our rank is suffering major for this, which we understand. However, as we make changes, and I track and perform test searches, the pages that Google ranks for keywords never seems to match or make sense, at all. For example, I search for "solid scrub tops" and it ranks the "print scrub tops" category. Or the "Men Clearance" page is ranking for keyword "Women Scrub Pants". Or, I will search for a specific brand, and it ranks a completely different brand. Has anyone else seen this behavior with duplicate content issues? Or is it an issue with some other penalty? At this point, our only option is to test something and see what impact it has, but it is difficult to do when keywords do not align with content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lunavista-comm0 -
Why is /home used in this company's home URL?
Just working with a company that has chosen a home URL with /home latched on - very strange indeed - has anybody else comes across this kind of homepage URL "decision" in the past? I can't see why on earth anybody would do this! Perhaps simply a logic-defying decision?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Show parts of page A on page B & C?
Good afternoon,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft
A quick question. I am working on a website which has a large page with different sections. Lets say: Page 1
SECTION A
SECTION B
SECTION C Now, they are adding a new area where they want to show only certain sections, so it would look like this: Page 2
SECTION A Page 3
SECTION C Page 4
SECTION D So my question is, would a rel='canonical' tag back to Page 1 be the correct way of preempting any duplicate content issues? I do not need Page 2-4 to even be indexed, it is just a matter of usability and giving the users what they are looking for without all the rest of the extra stuff. Gracias. Tesekürler. Salamat Ko. Thanks. (bonus thumbs up for anybody who knows which languages each of those are) 🙂0 -
First Link on Page Still Only Link on Page?
Bruce Clay and others did some research and found that the first link on the page is the most important and what is accredited as the link. Any other links on the page mean nothing. Is this still true? And in that case, on an ecommerce site with category links in the top navigation (which is high on the code), is it not useful to link to categories in the content of the page? Because the category is already linked to on that page. Thank you, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Redirecting thin content city pages to the state page, 404s or 301s?
I have a large number of thin content city-level pages (possibly 20,000+) that I recently removed from a site. Currently, I have it set up to send a 404 header when any of these removed city-level pages are accessed. But I'm not sending the visitor (or search engine) to a site-wide 404 page. Instead, I'm using PHP to redirect the visitor to the corresponding state-level page for that removed city-level page. Something like: if (this city page should be removed) { header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rriot
header("Location:http://example.com/state-level-page")
exit();
} Is it problematic to send a 404 header and still redirect to a category-level page like this? By doing this, I'm sending any visitors to removed pages to the next most relevant page. Does it make more sense to 301 all the removed city-level pages to the state-level page? Also, these removed city-level pages collectively have very little to none inbound links from other sites. I suspect that any inbound links to these removed pages are from low quality scraper-type sites anyway. Thanks in advance!2