Page rank 2 for home page, 3 for service pages
-
Hey guys,
I have noticed with one of our new sites, the home page is showing page rank two, whereas 2 of the internal service pages are showing as 3. I have checked with both open site explorer and yahoo back links and there are by far more links to the home page. All quality and relevant directory submissions and blog comments.
The site is only 4 months old, I wonder if anyone can shed any light on the fact 2 of the lesser linked pages are showing higher PR?
Thanks
-
Cool - have you figured out what the problem might be yet?
-
Hi Alex, I appreciate that answer loads. I will check all of the points you mentioned, however I am travelling from the UK to Thailand over the next day or so, so I will take a look once I land and sleep! Appreciate both yourself and Nsauers help loads on this
-
Does your homepage show (in Google's index) under different URLs? E.g.
That would split the authority over the separate URLs. You should redirect any differences to one standard URL and all of your links should point to the exact same homepage URL if possible.
Is your homepage linked to on every page on your website? How about those service pages? Your internal link structure goes a long way towards showing which pages are the most important.
PageRank updates infrequently. There's a possibility the value of your internal pages has been updated, but the homepage hasn't. Have you checked the Page Authority in SEOmoz PRO?
You say you have links from "relevant directory submissions and blog comments" - as it's a new site you might not have a varied link profile, so the link building could look unnatural. A spike of links from directories, for example, doesn't look natural - so Google might not give the links as much weight as they would have done had the links been built over a longer time period.
Do you have any/more outbound links on your homepage? Are you selling links?
It could just be down to the fact that the site is new. The authority of the homepage should naturally build over time if you continue to concentrate on building a relevant link profile from varied sources.
-
Yeah sure, that's a good point and actually makes total sense.
When I look at the site, one of the service pages has only links from the body text of the blog and the home page yet it is PR 3. Do you think it makes sense to also produce more internal body text links from the blog and service pages to the home page? To out weigh the blog comments?
-
Yea, I have found and tested the fact that Google has essentially de-valued Comments, Footers, and Sidebars. To what extent I don't know. I wouldn't cease any natural blog commenting as it is just that, natural.
My comment was merely regarding the value (weighting) of different types of links. A blog comment link is worth much less than a link in the body or content section of the page. And because of this it could lead to your inside pages being considered more authoritative.
It's not that the homepage is being penalized or looked upon negatively, it just doesn't have the same inbound link juice.
-
you know that is weird. Although it is a method of spammers, if the site is relevant to your own, it makes no sense for Google to de-value.
The comments on the blogs are mostly no follow, but they are comments made by an employee who is networking in the industry and is not concerned if the actions affect the SEO of the site. He is simply commenting on relevant blogs that are of interest.
Do you think I should ask them to stop? I really didn't think this kind of no-follow comment link paid any negative towards PR. As long as the site is relevant, it is natural behaviour.
-
Hi! It's highly possible that the homepage is not getting full link juice value since you mention that it receives blog comment links. First, those are likely nofollow and second they have been devalued by Google since they are a known method of spammers.
If the other pages receive better quality links they will be considered more authoritative than the homepage. Just my thoughts!
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
-
Indexed pages
Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers... Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages Google search using site command: 468 results MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500) Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz1 -
Best way to change URL for already ranking pages
Hello. I have a lot of pages that I'm optimising. The ones I'm focusing on right now is already ranking, but the URLs could be better (they don't include the keywords right now). However I'm worried that if I change the URLs they will drop in rankings or have to start over. I would of course set up 301 redirect, but is there more I need to do? What is the best way to change URL for already ranking pages?
Technical SEO | | GoMentor0 -
3,511 Pages Indexed and 3,331 Pages Blocked by Robots
Morning, So I checked our site's index status on WMT, and I'm being told that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and the robots are blocking 3,331. This seems slightly odd as we're only disallowing 24 pages on the robots.txt file. In light of this, I have the following queries: Do these figures mean that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and blocking 3,331 other pages? Or does it mean that it's blocking 3,331 pages of the 3,511 indexed? As there are only 24 URLs being disallowed on robots.text, why are 3,331 pages being blocked? Will these be variations of the URLs we've submitted? Currently, we don't have a sitemap. I know, I know, it's pretty unforgivable but the old one didn't really work and the developers are working on the new one. Once submitted, will this help? I think I know the answer to this, but is there any way to ascertain which pages are being blocked? Thanks in advance! Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Can too many pages hurt crawling and ranking?
Hi, I work for local yellow pages in Belgium, over the last months we introduced a succesfull technique to boost SEO traffic: we have created over 150k of new pages, all targeting specific keywords and all containing unique content, a site architecture to enable google to find these pages through crawling, xml sitemaps, .... All signs (traffic, indexation of xml sitemaps, rankings, ...) are positive. So far so good. We are able to quickly build more unique pages, and I wonder how google will react to this type of "large scale operation": can it hurt crawling and ranking if google notices big volumes of content (unique content)? Please advice
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0 -
Blog Ranking NOT home page main website?!
Hi, Our Blog (http://blog.thailand-investigation.com) is ranking for some of our major keywords but not our home page (http://www.thailand-investigation.com)!? Our blog is WordPress and our main website is HTML. It seems like the search engines consider that they are 2 separate websites!? When I check the incoming links to our website, I get also the blog links!!!??? Is it normal? Do I have to build a relation of some kind or write some code saying that it is our Blog... I don't know! I'm not a SEO specialist or even a webmaster. I'm a small business owner and take care on my website. I created by myself but never learned! So, please help! Thanks
Technical SEO | | MichelMauquoi0 -
Sending signals to Google to rank the correct page for a set of Keywords.
Hi All, Out of all our keywords their are 3 that are showing our home page in the serps rather than the specific product page URL on Google.co.za (Google.com ranks the correct URL) Im not sure why this is happening as most links built using the anchor text are pointing to the correct page. Why would google prefer ranking our home page on local search and rank the correct page on Google.com? (only 3 keywords have this problem) I have tried to correct this by creating links from strong internal pages with anchor text pointing to the correct URL. I have also concentrated on building links from .co.za domains using the anchor text and correct URL but to no avail. It has been 2 weeks now, since i tried to sort it out, but im not sure what else i can do to tell Google to rank the correct page. Any ideas? Regards Greg
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets0 -
Frequent updating of pages on website to rank better
Will updating each page often for example everyday or few days, rank the page and/or website better in google. The reason I ask is that I made 18 websites about three months ago and the traffic initially was alot higher and has fallen little by little thru the 3 months. Also how well my pages rank has also fallen. I just put out the websites, have done nothing else. No linking, etc. No updates. It is evident that without new links coming in, the website will fall in rank ie., link aquistion velocity But my question is if I update the pages and change content frequently will this improve my position in google and other search engines. The traffic on websites over the three months if graphed sort of looks like a stair case going down.
Technical SEO | | mickey110