Category Page Outranks Homepage
-
I have an online party store and when I search for broad industry terms: (party supplies & party decorations) I notice that one of my category pages outranks the homepage. The homepage's Page Authority is better and more external links pointing to the homepage. Is there s technical SEO problem? Why would a category page outrank the homepage?
-
Hi
gardenbeet.com had the same problem about 4 years ago - do not be alarmed. It just means that the internal page has (probably) higher value links than the home page .
At the time I was advised to look at my site architecture to ensure the link juice gets distributed around the website (at least as evenly as the home page would redirect the juice) (not sure if that point is still relevant).
-
It's because both your homepage and that particular category page are targetting the same keywords and are competing with each other in search results. It's rather rare that category outranks the homepage but it's not impossible. This category page has a lot more text content but also images to sub categories etc Google obviously sees it as more relevant to the search queery/keyword.
I would suggest looking at the homepage if it could be reoptimised for other maybe broader keywords to gain some extra benefits.
-
Mark thanks for the response. When I search for (party supplies or party decorations) I see competitor's homepages, not their category pages. Also when I search cheap party supplies then I see the homepage in search results. It sjust makes me think something technical is going wrong. Maybe canonicalization?
-
Homepage authority is almost always going to be better than inner page authority. That just has to do with natural linking behavior.
From Google's perspective, they want to show the most relevant page to the search. Presumably, since the inner page has more of the relevant keywords in its URL, Google is saying it would rather send people there.
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
-
Blog page took over homepage
I don't manage to rank my homepage I am trying to rank my homepage on the product name "Rubbee" in Switzerland https://bit.ly/2S004lL, I have .ch domain and it the homepage appears nowhere in the 1 st 20 pages in Switzerland... whereas a website like this one https://bit.ly/2RYCCVT with zero text appears on the 13 th page. For your info when I put the website online over 2 years ago... my homepage was ranking on the 1 st page but since I created a blog page https://bit.ly/2UnL2aX, the blog page took over and it is now impossible to rank the homepage.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Multiple pages for a Profile
Hi All, We have a Biography website in which we have Celebrity News, Videos, Images etc. We have a main page which shows the biography and sides we show 5 blocks of News, Videos, Images etc and have a More option when clicked the page goes to a page where it shows 100's of news of that celeb or Videos etc This is the main page : sitename.com/celebrityname news: sitename.com/celebrityname/news Videos: sitename.com/celebrityname/videos Images: sitename.com/celebrityname/Images Now these 3 pages have no content in them and when we scan via SEMRUSH it shows as "with duplicate title tags". We have 20K such bio's so 20K * 3 such pages is 60K duplicate title tags How can we deal with such pages? Any help please. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leengsro870 -
Drop in Indexed pages
Hope everyone is having an Awesome December! I first noticed a drop in my index in the beginnings of November. My site drop in indexed pages from 1400 to 600 in the past 3-4 weeks. I don't know the cause of it, and would like the community to help me figure out why my indexing has dropped. Thank you for taking time out of your schedule to read this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BSC0 -
How should I deal with this page?
Hey Mozzers, I was looking for a little guidance and advice regarding a couple of pages on my website. I have used 'shoes' for this example. I have the current structure Parent Category - Shoes Sub Categories - Blue Shoes
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP
Hard Shoes
Soft Shoes
Big Shoes etc Supporting Article - Different Types of Shoe and Their Uses There are about 12 subcategories in total - each one links back to the Parent Category with the keyword "Shoes". Every sub category has gone from ranking 50+ to 10-30th for its main keyword which is a good start and as I release supporting articles im sure each one will climb. I am happy with this. The Article ranks no1 for about 20 longtails terms around "different shoes". This page attracts around 60% of my websites traffic but we know this traffic will not convert as most are people and children looking for information only for educational purposes and are not looking to buy. Many are also looking for a type of product we dont sell. My issue is ranking for the primary category "Shoes" keyword. When i first made the changes we went from ranking nowhere to around 28th on the parent category page targeted at "Shoes". Whilst not fantastic this was good as gave us something to work off. However a few weeks later, the article page ranked 40th for this term and the main page dropped off the scale. Then another week some of the sub category pages ranked for it. And now none of my pages rank in the top 50 for it. I am fairly sure this is due to some cannibalisation - simply because of various pages ranking for it at different times.
I also think that additional content added by products on the sub category pages is giving them more content and making them rank better. The Page Itself
The Shoes page itself contains 400 good unique words, with the keyword mentioned 8 times including headings. There is an image at the top of the page with its title and alt text targeted towards the keyword. The 12 sub categories are linked to on the left navigation bar, and then again below the 400 words of content via a picture and text link. This added the keyword to the page another 18 or so times in the form of links to longtail subcaterogies. This could introduce a spam problem i guess but its in the form of nav bars or navigation tables and i understood this to be a necessary evil on eCommerce websites. There are no actual products linked from this page. - a problem? With all the basic SEO covered. All sub pages linking back to the parent category, the only solution I can think of is to add more content by Adding all shoes products to the shoe page as it currently only links out the the sub categories Merging the "Different Type of Shoe and Their Uses" article into the shoe page to make a super page and make the article pages less like to produce cannibalistic problems. However, by doing solution 2, I remove a page bringing in a lot of traffic. The traffic it brings in however is of very little use and inflates the bounce rate and lowers the conversion rate of my whole site by significant figures. It also distorts other useful reports to track my other progress. I hope i have explained well enough, thanks for sticking with me this far, i havn't posted links due to a reluctance by the company so hopefully my example will suffice. As always thanks for any input.0 -
301 redirect for page 2, page 3 etc of an article or feed
Hey guys, We're looking to move a blog feed we have to a new static URL page. We are using 301 redirects but I'm unsure of what to regarding page 2, page 3 etc. of the feed. How do I make sure those urls are being redirected as well? For example: Moving FloridaDentist.com/blog/dental-tips/ to a new page url FloridaDentist.com/dental-tips. So, we are using a 301 on that old url to the new one. My questions is what to do with the other pages like FloridaDentist.com/blog/dental-tips/page/3. How do we make sure that page is also 301'd to the new main url?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Page not appearing in SERPs
I have a regional site that does fairly well for most towns in the area (top 10-20). However, one place that has always done OK and has great content is not anywhere within the first 200. Everything looks OK, canonical link is correct, I can find the page if I search for exact text, there aren't any higher ranking duplicate pages. Any ideas what may have happened and how I can confirm a penalty for example. TIA,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornwall
Chris0 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Homepage Content
I have a website which perform very well for some keywords and much less for other keywords. I would like to try to optimize the keywords with less performance. Let's say our website offers 2 main services: KEYWORD A and KEYWORD Z. KEYWORD Z is a very important keyword for us in terms of revenue. KEYWORD A gives us position Nr 1 on our local Google and redirect properly the visitors to xxxxxx.com/keyword-a/keyword-a.php KEYWORD Z perform badly and gives us position Nr 7 on local Google search. 90% Google traffic is sent to xxxxxx.com/keyword-z/keyword-z.php and the other 10% is sent to the home page of the website. The Homepage is a "soup" of all the services our company offers, some are important (KEYWORD Z) and other much less important. In order to optimize the keyword KEYWORD Z we were thinking to make a permanent redirect for xxxxxx.com/keyword-z/keyword-z.php to xxxxxx.com and optimize the content of the Homepage to ONLY describe our KEYWORD Z. I am not sure if Google gives more importance in the content of the homepage or not. Of course links on the homepage to other pages like xxxxxx.com/keyword-a/keyword-a.php will still exists. The point for us is maybe to optimize better the homepage and give more importance to the KEYWORD Z. Does it make sense or not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netbuilder0