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Why My Site Inner Pages Ranking Higher Than My Homepage?
juderm
Posts: 31
Joined: 28 Feb 11
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04 Mar 12 7:50 pm

Why My Site Inner Pages Ranking Higher Than My Homepage?

I have a site about 3 months old and the homepage was ranked 1st page before, then it went down to the lower page search in Google. I made some good changes which will make my site to rank back higher again plus I added 2 more pages which were also optimized to rank. Now after so many weeks I found that my site is still on the bottom page of Google search, maybe on about page 35, however my inside web page to be exact my "about-us" page is on page 5 in Google search which was ranked higher than my homepage. I did not even start doing deep backlinkings yet on all my pages to rank them higher.

I am wondering why this is so? I have been optimizing my homepage more than my inside site pages. What do you think is wrong? Should I just wait and keep on adding backlinks to my homepage hoping to bring it to the top page? Will creating backlinks or off page SEO to my inner web pages improve my homepage ranking?

I need your advise on this since I am just a newbie your professional tips will help me a lot. Thanks in advance!
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cecille.l
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Joined: 25 Feb 11
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05 Mar 12 2:24 am

 Hi JUDERM,

It is actually your individual article pages that you need to get ranking, and not your homepage, about page or contact page. You can try building more backlinks to your homepage if that is what you prefer, but you need to pay equal attention to your articles and have them rank too for their keywords.

If your site is new (about less than 6 months old), then it's probably going through a Google Dance. Google Dance is when your pages go up and down the search results pages, as Google tries to determine your pages' relevance to your keywords. I suggest you keep on building backlinks and driving traffic to your site. Your ranking in the SERPs should stabilize in time.

Hope that helps. Have a good day!
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Cecille

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juderm
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Joined: 28 Feb 11
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05 Mar 12 4:30 pm

 Thanks Cecille! Actually my concern is this. My domain for example: MyDOMAIN.COM is not ranking higher than my pages which in this case the "ABOUT-US" page. This page is ranking higher than my domain and I did not even work on backlinks for this. When you say HOMEPAGE does it meant to be my main site "my DOMAIN.COM" where when you type it in the search browser it will bring you to my homepage? This is what I meant in my message above. My homepage is not ranking higher than my pages. People are searching for the keyword that I ranked and they always get my "ABOUT-US" page instead of my main site which is for example "my DOMAIN.com". This is way down to about page 35 in Google search but my other pages are higher than this. So by just doing backlinkings on all my pages as you said, will improve my main site rankings. Hope i understood this correctly. I thank you very much for your great advice!
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cecille.l
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06 Mar 12 7:07 am

 Hi JUDERM,

I suggest you run your pages through Traffic Travis or a similar SEO tool so you can check what your pages to better optimize them for their respective keywords. If your About page ranks higher than your homepage (which is what you would get when you type http://www.domain.com in your browser), then it's possible you have more backlinks pointing to the About Page. This would raise your About Page's relevance to the keywords you're targeting so it would rank higher then than your homepage.

It's perfectly alright for your other pages to rank higher than your homepage for the keywords they are targeting. Make sure that when you build backlinks, you use proper anchor text, as these help increase relevance to your webpages for the keywords you're targeting.

It would help if I can see your URL so I can check on it further, but generally, I wouldn't be so worried if my other pages are ranking higher than my homepage.

Hope that helps. Have a good day!
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Cecille

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mark schaaf
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07 Apr 12 2:02 pm

 My main website has about 60 or so pages on it and almost all my internal pages rank higher then the home page. It is nice to rank high for the home page because the viewer can see everything you have to offer. However if they type in a specific keyword string and find your site because they are interested in your article this is just as good because if your site is like most sites you will still have your navigation bar on it showing other subjects of interest. I wouldn't worry about your home page not ranking as high as internal pages just try to get them all to rank higher because anytime anyone clicks something and lands on any page on your site is a good thing. Mark
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Mark
 
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jimcoe
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07 Apr 12 4:07 pm

 @Juderm,

I agree with Cecille that you should use a good SEO product to see what problems might exist on your pages. Perhaps in optimizing the home page something was done that Google sees as "over-optimised" or such? And an SEO program might let you determine why your "about" page ranks so well, so that you could do the same for your other pages?

I do like Traffic Travis for SEO research.

This brings up the question about "Home" page Vs "Sales" page (or "Landing" page).

My opinion:
An optimized sales page should do just one thing - present an offer and help persuade the visitor to take action. Anything more makes it less effective as a sales tool. Maybe it does 2 things at most, a product offer and also a mail list signup.

And typically you don't want a lot of links on a sales page leading people away from your sales process - so limited navigation is common.

A home page has an entirely different job - to greet the visitor, orient them, let them know what your site is about and present full navigation and search tools.

If that's how your site is done, then (obviously) the sales/landing page should rank highest and have the most backlinks.

Other opinions?
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rapidsslonline
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11 Apr 12 9:07 am

 Fairly, Want to advise you that just run one back link campaign for your home page which includes the main key phrase and then wait for result. Might it will boost you again on top.
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info368
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06 Jan 13 10:16 am

 Dear All,
After google penguin updates we(as www.luxuryistanbul.com ) have lost all of our inner pages at Search Engines. We only have main page which is available during google & yahoo searches. We couldn't understand the reason to this. Is this a punishment by google & yahoo? We have been facing this problem for almost over 4months. We assume that the reason could be our former SEO company who was saying us they only use white hat seo techniques.

If you could help us to solve this issue, please kindly share your valuable feed backs with us.

Thanks in advance

Look forward to hear,

cheers
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