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.
Subpage ranking for homepage keyword
-
Hi all,
May seem like a simple scenario and I might be missing something, but my subpage seems to be ranking for my main homepage keyword.
The subpage PR is 28 and my domain authority is 17, how can I get my main home page to rank instead of the sub page (product page)?
I want to stay away from exact match anchor text links, any suggestions?
-
Hi Phillip,
Try using the On Page Optimization tool under "Search" in your Moz Analytics account to grade each page for the term. It could be that the internal page is better-targeted for the term, even though it's only loosely related.
It's also possible that the subpage has received a high number of links from third parties, although this is fairly rare. There is no chance that the home page is under any sort of filter or penalty from backlink activity (e.g. too many anchors with the target term used as anchor text, pointing at the home page?). Although also not terribly common, Google has been known to penalise pages but not entire websites, based upon the page's backlinks.
You can also try linking to the home page from the subpage and including the target term in the link, but not linking to the subpage from the home page.
-
Hi Phillip
Thanks for your response.
My homepage is ranking no.1 when I do the site: search.
The home page is indexed, and yes sorry I mean PA, the sub page is loosely relevant.
-
Do you have competing title tags, headings, and content between this sub-page and the home page? If they are the same or similar, something on the home page makes it more appealing to rank than your home page. It could be better quality content that is more relevant to the keyword than the home page or it could signify issues with your home page as Philip alluded to.
Limited content or mixed content on the home page could be an issue or it may be technical. Is the home page not loading correctly or loading very slowly? Also, is your home page not ranking for they keyword or is the sub-page just higher in ranking? Does your home page rank for other keywords?
-
For some reason, Google has decided that the interior page is more relevant for the query. There's many reason this might happen...
Go to google.com and do a "site:" search for your domain. site:example.com -- Is your homepage ranking #1 on the SERP? If not, your homepage may not be indexed or might have a manual penalty imposed. Are you 100% sure the homepage is indexed? Do you have Webmaster Tools? Make sure everything is all square in there.
What do you mean by the subpage's PR is 28? Do you mean PA? Is this interior page very relevant for your main keyword or is it just sort of (loosely) relevant?
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
-
What to do with PDFs that rank well?
Looking at some reports, I found that a client's site has PDFs that are ranking well for niche terms and getting some traffic. What can I do to get more out of them from a marketing standpoint? The obvious issue is that a PDF doesn't have the interactivity of a site visit, where we have analytics and CTAs. Someone has to follow a link back from the PDF to the site for us to even register a visit, let alone try to get their email or have them otherwise convert. My first guess is to make landing page summaries of the PDF content that link to the PDF, and canonical the PDF to the respective landing page. Has anyone tried this, or done something else that they would recommend again in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JFA0 -
Page rank and menus
Hi, My client has a large website and has a navigation with main categories. However, they also have a hamburger type navigation in the top right. If you click it it opens to a massive menu with every category and page visible. Do you know if having a navigation like this bleeds page rank? So if all deep pages are visible from the hamburger navigation this means that page rank is not being conserved to the main categories. If you click a main category in the main navigation (not the hamburger) you can see the sub pages. I think this is the right structure but the client has installed this huge menu to make it easier for people to see what there is. From a technical SEO is this not bad?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AL123al0 -
Keyword Ranking Fluctuations
Hi Guys I am currently working on a website where one of the keyword targets is fluctuating. The keyword is fluctuating between page 2 and page 5. What makes this strange is that we are not experiencing the issue with any other keyword targets. They are all ranking fine. It is only 1 keyword. The keyword target happens to be the main homepage keyword target - not sure if this makes a difference? The homepage targets 2 keyword e.g. Business Offices & Accessories. The homepage ranks perfectly fine for e.g. Business Accessories but is fluctuating for e.g. Business Offices! Very strange. What makes it even stranger - the keyword variations of the fluctuating keyword e.g. office for business - these variations are all fine and not fluctuating. Its only 1 keyword. If anyone has any ideas or feedback that would be great! Thanks, Duncan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
Replacing keywords by synonyms. Will it increase risk of google keyword stuffing penalization?
I have a page which is ranking already pretty well for a relative competitive keyword.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Google also ranks us on first page for synonym of keyword we optimize the page for (even though synonym does not appear on our page). I am now considering to replace some occurences of the keyword in the page by different synonyms, in the hope that our ranking may further improve for these synonyms.
However I am concerned that google may penalize me for keyword stuffing if I am using a wide range of synonyms of one keyword on our page. My plan is only to replace some occurences of keyword with synonyms. I am a bit nerveous here since page is already ranking quite well in a competitive niche. Any thoughts?0 -
Why some websites can rank the keywords they don't have in the page?
Hello guys, Yesterday, I used SEMrush to search for the keyword "branding agency" to see the SERP. The Liquidagency ranks 5th on the first page. So I went to their homepage but saw no exact keywords "branding agency", even in the page source. Also, I didn't see "branding agency" as a top anchor text in the external links to the page (from the report of SEMrush). I am an SEO newbie, can someone explain this to me, please? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Raymondlee0 -
Keywords in URL: sub-directory or single layer keywords?
Hi guys, im putting together a proposal for a new site and trying to figure out if it'd be better to (A) have a keyword split across multiple directories or duplicate keywords to have the keyword hyphenated? For example, for the topic of "Christmas decor" would you use; (A) - www.domain.com/Christmas/Decor (B) - www.domain.com/Christmas/Christmas-Decor in example B the phrase 'Christmas' is duplicated which looks a little spammy, but the key term "Christmas decor" is in the URL without being broken up by directories. which is stronger? Any advice welcome! Thanks guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JAR8971 -
Too many iframes hurts ranking?
I have 6 different iframe blocks (with same content in those iframes) in every page of my website. I know iframe don't be crawled by search engines but, maybe you experts give me some advice? Is that negative for SEO ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nopsts0 -
Google Ranking Generally in Germany - Keywords & Umlauts
Hi Mozzers, I was hoping i could get some advice/opinions on a website ranking problem i have been working on, in particular one of the pages. This is our German language website which is hosted from Germany and a flaunt German speaking member of staff from our German office moderates the text content of the website for us.Our website seems to get good traffic ,visitor navigation and conversions. One of the keywords i focus building around is Schallpegelmessgerät which is one way of basically saying Sound level meter in German. The keyword uses an umlaut which i cannot use in the URL, but google is picking up and putting into the snippets, but apart from that our on-page optimization is good according to the moz tool. I have been trying to improve our content and we post many blog articles around the topic/keyword but google.de seems to choose not to even display this on the first couple of pages and sometimes ranks our blog articles around the third page. We are even been outranked by some low quality cheap online shop websites some of which with low quality content and low page and domain authorities. I had accepted this but after looking at bing.de and doing a search i find our page in the top 5 results, i understand that google and bing's algorhythms are different but just struggling to get my head around it all. Here is our website & page - http://www.cirrusresearch.de/produkte/schallpegelmessgerat/ Any advice on this situation would be greatly appreciated, thank you very much for reading this James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0