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
-
Google images not showing on SERP
Hi, I recently noticed that after a specific name search, Google images on the 'Web' SERP are no longer showing up. About a month ago, there were atleast 4-5 headshots of this particular person showing up whenever his name was searched. Now no images are showing, just the ten organic links and two links from adwords campaign we have going. The images are still optimized and some are even from editorial sites. Does anyone know what may have caused the images to disappear and what we can do to bring them back to the main SERP? (Not sure if it matters but we are in Canada) Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | Lorne_Marr0 -
G+ branding page?
My company has a G+ page for each of our 60 locations. Do we need a branding page as well?
Image & Video Optimization | | SSFCU0 -
Switching from ranked PDF to normal page ...
Hi folks, I have a project which is ranking well for specific product-keywords. The problem is, that the ranking pages are PDF files of those products (datasheets). But i do have a normal (html) pages for each product as well. Each of these pages has grade a for the specific keyword and is well crawled, etc. How can I urge Google to "switch" from these PDF files to the specific html pages. I was trying this by testing it robots.txt to disallow to index the PDF file (I tested it with one for first). I would add rel=nofollow to the link to the PDF on the specifi product html page (?) ... Any ideas? Seb
Image & Video Optimization | | TheHecksler0 -
Is it considered duplicate contentnt to post a video to youtube then embed that video on our website's FAQs page?
Essentially, I am answering popular questions we are asked and answering them in a video. Once I post it on youtube, I take the video, add it to our FAQ page, and when someone clicks on the question, a new page opens with the question, the video, and the written answer to the question underneath it. Thanks for any advice. watch?v=bwGRmvnCn7w
Image & Video Optimization | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Maps on landing page for SAB
For a SAB (service area business) would it help to have a map of their location on the Homepage?
Image & Video Optimization | | echo10 -
301 redirect .com to .co.uk to improve position in UK serps
I've set up a new campaign for a website specifically targetting a service offered in a specific UK city. It's on a .com domain, and we've managed to get a few powerful links and while its only been going for a few weeks it's starting to get decent rankings in Google.com but is nowhere to be seen in Google.co.uk. It's getting good traffic but not traffic that converts probably because it's targeted to the UK and most visitors are from the US. I've just set up Google places, changed geo targeting to the UK, I've moved over to a UK host and we're targetting UK sites for links. I think while things are still at an early stage it would be a good idea to move everything that's on the .com over to the .co.uk with a 301 redirect and send all new links over to the .co.uk. What do you guys think? Is this a good idea? Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | sandanista0 -
Question Regarding Multiple Google Places Pages
Hello, One of my clients has about 20 different google places pages at locations that are not real. The previous SEO company thought that would help with local search. My problem is that several great reviews have been written on each page by real customers. I want to close the places pages for locations that don't exist, but I don't want to lose the reviews. Is anyone aware of a solution for this? I have searched Google's forums and have not found anything.
Image & Video Optimization | | Bjolley0 -
Page speed not good despite CDN and caching. Can this be fixed?
My page speed results are here, showing a speed of 40 seconds. I get an F for compress text, compress images and cache static content.How do I resolve this? Also.. I've set up a CDN. Is it a problem for SEO, that there is a copy of all my images and content at cdn.mysite.com? We get lots of search traffic through google images search.
Image & Video Optimization | | devdg0