Internal Pages outranking homepage in SERPs
-
First of all I would like to stress that this relates to a new site which is just a few weeks old, however it is something that has regularly happened to a lot of our websites in the past, so I am wondering if there is some underlying problem.
We have recently setup the domain www.calcioitaliashop.com. The domain name itself "calcio italia shop" is actually one of the main keywords we are targeting.
However, when we enter this into google (we are using .co.uk version), a lot of the category pages appear, yet the root domain does not.
Does this indicate some coding problem with the website? I thought we might have some robots problem, but running a site://www.calcioitaliashop.com command shows that the homepage is in the index, so I am just wondering what could be causing these results?
-
You need to show Google why the homepage is most important for that term. I haven't looked in depth, but here are a couple of things...
Has Google added your brand name to the title tag here on the SERPs? "Store info : Football Shirts, Kits & Maglia - Calcio Italia Shop_" - _www.calcioitaliashop.com/store_info.htm
I notice it's not the same within your coded title tag. If you've recently removed the brand from your About Us page that could help. See here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization
I haven't checked your link profile but is it possible there are more links (or more powerful links) to your About Us page, rather than your home page? If so, getting this reversed will help, or as it's a new site, perhaps this hasn't happened yet. Setting up profiles with social networks and adding the link to your homepage will help show Google that that is the most important page. You could also create a Google Places profile with a link to the homepage, if you haven't already. Bolding "Calcio Italia Shop" on your About Us makes it look like that page is important for that term. You could remove that bolding or change it to "Calcio Italia Store" (there seems to be some confusion over what your brand name is?) and add "Calcio Italia Shop" to a H1 tag on your homepage.
These little things will help send the right signals, but I don't think it's something you need to worry about long-term - I think Google will eventually figure out the homepage is best to rank for the brand name as that should naturally build up more page authority.
Also, I'd make it readable and put your brand name in the meta description of your homepage. The meta description isn't there to stuff keywords into, it's there to encourage people to click through from the SERPs. It should be around 155 characters max, the search engines chop more off.
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
-
Our client's web property recently switched over to secure pages (https) however there non secure pages (http) are still being indexed in Google. Should we request in GWMT to have the non secure pages deindexed?
Our client recently switched over to https via new SSL. They have also implemented rel canonicals for most of their internal webpages (that point to the https). However many of their non secure webpages are still being indexed by Google. We have access to their GWMT for both the secure and non secure pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
Should we just let Google figure out what to do with the non secure pages? We would like to setup 301 redirects from the old non secure pages to the new secure pages, but were not sure if this is going to happen. We thought about requesting in GWMT for Google to remove the non secure pages. However we felt this was pretty drastic. Any recommendations would be much appreciated.0 -
Massive SERP crash
I came in this morning to a swath of email updates from Moz. Our site had jumped in ranking in the four geographic regions we target and we were seeing (more or less) the best results we've ever had. Most of the jumps were only 1 - 4 places but they were for our most competitive keywords. Late this afternoon I did some spot checks on keywords to confirm that we were still holding roughly in the same positions and before I reported this to the wider business. We're not. What's more we have dropped off the first page for some terms and don't seem to be ranked at all for for others. The only keywords we're getting good rankings for are branded search terms. I can only assume this is due to a technical issues over the weekend our developers caused. I'm not completely across this but I at some point our sitemaps stopped working and a huge number of links on the site were broken. Could a massive surge in 404s cause this? I'm checking google analytics and I can't see a drop in organic traffic yet although I don't have the full figures for today. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahyde0 -
Consistent Ranking Jumps Page 1 to Page 5 for months - help needed
Hi guys and gals, I have a really tricky client who I just can't seem to gain consistency with in their SERP results. The keywords are competitive but what the main issue I have is the big page jumps that happen pretty much on a weekly basis. We go up and down 40 positions and this behaviour has been going on for nearly 6 months.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jon_bangonline
I felt it would resolve itself in time but it has not. The website is a large ecommerce website. Their link profile is OK in regards to several high quality newspaper publication links, majority brand related anchor texts and the link building we have engaged in has all been very good i.e. content relevant / high quality places. See below for some potential causes I think could be the reason: The on page SEO is good however the way their ecommerce website is setup they have formed a substantial amount of duplicate title tags. So in my opinion this is a potential cause. The previous web developer set-up 301 redirects all to their home page for any 404 errors. I know best practice is to go to the most relevant pages, however could this be a potential issue? We had some server connectivity issues show up in webmasters tools but that was for 1 day about 4 months ago. Since then no issues. they have quite a few 'blocked URLs' in their robots.txt file, e.g. Disallow: /login, Disallow: /checkout/ but to me these seem normal and not a big issue. We have seen a decrease over the last 12 months in Webmasters Tools of 'total indexed web pages' from 5000 to 2000 which is quite an odd statistic. Summary So all in all I am a tad stumped. We have some duplicate content issues in title tags, perhaps not following best practice in the 301 redirects but other than that I dont see any major on page issues, unless I am missing something in the seriousness of what I have listed.
Finally we have also do a bit of a cull of poor quality links, requesting links to be removed and also submitting a 'disavow' of some really bad links. We do not have a manual penalty though. Thoughts, feedback or comments VERY welcome.0 -
Should I block temporary pages
I need some SEO advice on an odd scenario: We are launching a new product line (party supplies) on it's own domain (PartySuperCenter.com). Due to some internal/technical reasons we will not be able to launch the site until the summer. We already have the product in our warehouse so the owners want to created a section on our current site (CostumeSuperCenter.com) for the new products. Once the new site is up the product will be removed from our current site and moved to the new site. I am concerned about the effect this will have on our SEO - having thousands of product pages appear and then disappear after a few months. I was thinking about blocking the pages using the "noindex" tag. Is this how you would handle it? Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | costume0 -
Google is displaying my pages path instead of URLS (Pages name)
Does anyone knows why Google is displaying my pages path instead of the URL in the search results, i discoverd that while am searching using a keyword of mine then i copied the link http://www.smarttouch.me/services-saudi/web-services/web-design and found all related results are the same, could anyone one tell me why is that and is it really differs? or the URL display is more important than the Path display for SEO!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ali8810 -
Will pages irrelevant to a site's core content dilute SEO value of core pages?
We have a website with around 40 product pages. We also have around 300 pages with individual ingredients used for the products and on top of that we have some 400 pages of individual retailers which stock the products. Ingredient pages have same basic short info about the ingredients and the retail pages just have the retailer name, adress and content details. Question is, should I add noindex to all the ingredient and or retailer pages so that the focus is entirely on the product pages? Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArchMedia0 -
Pages that were ranking now are not?
Hi Folks Noticed something strange just now pages that were ranking on position 10 on Google for searches such as 'ufc trainer kinect best price' at the start of this week are no longer ranking? Is what has happened to the site the famous google dance or sandbox effect as the site only officially went live on Monday If this is the case what is the recommended course of action to get back ranking competitively again? as I have no idea on what has gone wrong as I has always tried to follow best practice from these forums and the SEOMOZ and YOUMOZ articles My site is www.cheapfindergames.com Many Thanks Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocelot0 -
Why does this page not show in google at all?
www.lavenderblue-flowers.co.uk Sorry for formatting, below is the source. There are alot of blocks from robots.txt but is there anything easily rectified to get this site SOME visibility? Duplicate content maybe PANDA had it? No backlink profile too which isnt helping but even still, surprising to see a domain auth of 1. Thanks in advance for any responses. DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html><head><meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"><meta http-equiv="expires" content="Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:06:27 GMT"><title>Bridport Interflora Florist, Lavender Blue, Dorset, DT16 3XDtitle><meta name="description" content="Lavender Blue in Bridport, Dorset, DT16 3XD delivers to Interflora florist based in Bridport is a well established family run business with a dedicated team of florists. We specialise in beautiful wedding flowers and take great pride in our funeral tributes, floral arrangements designed for any occasion for local, national and worldwide delivery."><meta name="keywords" content="Bridport,Interflora Florist,Lavender Blue,Dorset,DT16 3XD"><meta name="abstract" content="Interflora florist based in Bridport is a well established family run business with a dedicated team of florists. We specialise in beautiful wedding flowers and take great pride in our funeral tributes, floral arrangements designed for any occasion for local, national and worldwide delivery."><meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow"><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/kernel/styles/print.css?new=new" media="print"><link rel="stylesheet" href="/kernel/styles/d4.css?designtype=d4;theme=blue;" type="text/css"><style type="text/css">style><script language="JavaScript1.2" src="/kernel/utils.js?new" type="text/javascript">script><script language="JavaScript1.2" type="text/javascript" src="/kernel/interflora.js?head=1;si=1000343;">script><script language="JavaScript1.2" type="text/javascript">script><script language="javascript"> var b_site_url = getcookie('b_site_url');if (b_site_url != "" && !getcookie('referral_id') && location.protocol == 'http:' && b_site_url != location.host && location.pathname.indexOf('catalog2') == -1) location.href = location.protocol + "//" + b_site_url + location.pathname + location.search;script>head><body><img border="0" src="/kernel/images/speck.gif" width="1" height="1" alt class="nospace"><div id="page-body"><table class="page-topbanner" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td background="/kernel/images/d4/border-blue_03.gif" align="left" valign="top"><img src="/kernel/images/d4/border-blue_01.gif" alt>td><td colspan="2" style="background-image: url(/kernel/images/d4/border-blue_03.gif); background-position: top; background-repeat: repeat-x;"><img src="/kernel/images/speck.gif" width="300" height="50" alt>td><td align="right" valign="top" background="/kernel/images/d4/border-blue_03.gif"><img src="/kernel/images/d4/border-blue_04.gif" alt>td>tr><tr><td style="background-image: url(/kernel/images/d4/border-blue_05.gif); background-repeat: repeat-y;" align="left" valign="top"><img src="/kernel/images/d4/border-blue_01b.gif" alt>td><td valign="top" class="sd-image_only" id="sd-logo_store" colspan="1" rowspan="1"><img src="/kernel/imageload?ttl2=15;table=content_images;key1=fd_img_2606422_1" alt="" title="">td><td class="logo-if" align="right"><img src="/kernel/images/logo-if.png" alt="interflora.co.uk the flower experts™">td><td style="background-image: url(/kernel/images/d4/border-blue_07.gif); background-position: right; background-repeat: repeat-y;"> td>tr><tr><td style="background-image: url(/kernel/images/d4/border-blue_05.gif); background-position: left; background-repeat: repeat-y;" colspan="3" align="center"><table id="website" cellspacing="0" border="0" align="center"><tr><td colspan="3" id="fol_address">1 Lilliput Lane, Bridport, Dorset, DT16 3XDtd>tr><tr><td id="email" colspan="3"><b>Email:b> [email protected]>tr><tr><td style="padding-right:10px;"><b>Phone:b> 01308 459145td><td style="padding-right:10px;"><b>Fax:b> 01308 458417td>tr>table>td><td style="background-image: url(/kernel/images/d4/border-blue_07.gif); background-position: right; background-repeat: repeat-y;"> td>tr><tr><td style="background-image: url(/kernel/images/d4/border-blue_05.gif); background-position: left; background-repeat: repeat-y;" colspan="3" align="center"><div class="page-topmenu"><table class="page-topmenu" cellspacing="0"><tr><td id="account"><a href="/myaccount/"><img src="/kernel/images/d4/icon-account.gif" style="margin: 3px 3px 4px 3px; vertical-align: middle;" width="15" height="13" alt="My Account">My Accounta>td><td id="menu"><a href="/">Homea><img class="bullet" src="/kernel/images/speck.gif" width="2" height="2" alt style="margin: 10px 4px 10px 4px;"><a href="/page.xml?page_name=about">About Usa><img class="bullet" src="/kernel/images/speck.gif" width="2" height="2" alt style="margin: 10px 4px 10px 4px;"><a href="/page.xml?page_name=delivery">Delivery Infoa><img class="bullet" src="/kernel/images/speck.gif" width="2" height="2" alt style="margin: 10px 4px 10px 4px;"><a href="/page.xml?page_name=contactus">Contact Usa>td><td id="cart"><a href="/shopcart/"><img src="/kernel/images/d4/icon-shopcart.gif" style="margin: 3px; vertical-align: middle;" width="14" hieght="14" alt="Shopping Basket">Shopping Basketa>td>tr>table>div>td><td style="background-image: url(/kernel/images/d4/border-blue_07.gif); background-position: right; background-repeat: repeat-y;"> td>tr>table><p id="browser-warning" style="display: block; padding: 2px; border: 2px solid #FC9F85; margin: 0px; background-color: #FDFFC4;"><b>For your information:b> This message has appeared because we've noticed your browser doesn't fully support all functions of this site. For further information please <a href="/page.xml?page_name=faq">click herea>.p><script language="JavaScript1.2" type="text/javascript">var theBrowser = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();if(is_nav7up || (parseInt(is_moz_ver) >= 1) || is_ie5_5up || theBrowser.indexOf("safari") != -1) {hideElement('browser-warning',0);}script><table class="body" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr><td align="left" valign="bottom" style="background-image: url(/kernel/images/d4/border-blue_05.gif); background-position: left; background-repeat: repeat-y;"><img src="/kernel/images/d4/border-blue_05.gif" alt>td><td class="menu" valign="top"><img src="/kernel/images/speck.gif" width="150" height="1" border="0" alt><br><form method="get" action="/search/index.xml" id="leftnav_search"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" class="global-search"><tr><th colspan="2">SEARCHth>tr><tr><td width="50%"><input class="text" type="text" name="keywords1" id="search" value maxlength="50" size="15">td><td align="left"><input type="submit" class="button" name="search" id="search" value="GO">td>tr><tr><td colspan="2" align="left"><a href="/search/advanced_search.xml">Advanced Searcha>td>tr>table>form><div class="menusection"><a class="menuParent_off" id="parentcat_2003443" href="/catalog/category.xml?category_id=2003443"><div class="spacer">div><span class="menu-bullet"><img src="/kernel/images/arrow.gif" class="menu-bullet">Anniversaryspan><div class="spacer">div>a><div class="menuChildren" id="menuChildrencat_2003443">div><a class="menuParent_off" id="parentcat_2003453" href="/catalog/category.xml?category_id=2003453"><div class="spacer">div><span class="menu-bullet"><img src="/kernel/images/arrow.gif" class="menu-bullet">Congratulationsspan><div class="spacer">div>a><div class="menuChildren" id="menuChildrencat_2003453">div><a class="menuParent_off" id="parentcat_4" href="/category/flower-arrangements/"><div class="spacer">div><span class="menu-bullet"><img src="/kernel/images/arrow.gif" class="menu-bullet">All Flower Bouquetsspan><div class="spacer">div>a><div class="menuChildren" id="menuChildrencat_4">div><a class="menuParent_off" id="parentcat_2003493" href="/catalog/category.xml?category_id=2003493"><div class="spacer">div><span class="menu-bullet"><img src="/kernel/images/arrow.gif" class="menu-bullet">Sympathy & Funeralspan><div class="spacer">div>a><div class="menuChildren" id="menuChildrencat_2003493">div><a class="menuParent_off" id="parentcat_2003463" href="/catalog/category.xml?category_id=2003463"><div class="spacer">div><span class="menu-bullet"><img src="/kernel/images/arrow.gif" class="menu-bullet">Thank Youspan><div class="spacer">div>a><div class="menuChildren" id="menuChildrencat_2003463">div><a class="menuParent_off" id="parentcat_2001478" href="/category/same-day-flowers/"><div class="spacer">div><span class="menu-bullet"><img src="/kernel/images/arrow.gif" class="menu-bullet">Same Day Flower Deliveryspan><div class="spacer">div>a><div class="menuChildren" id="menuChildrencat_2001478">div><a class="menuParent_off" id="parentcat_2124203" href="/category/summer_flowers/"><div class="spacer">div><span class="menu-bullet"><img src="/kernel/images/arrow.gif" class="menu-bullet">Summer Flowersspan><div class="spacer">div>a><div class="menuChildren" id="menuChildrencat_2124203">div><a class="menuParent_off" id="parentcat_2003403" href="/category/luxury-flowers/"><div class="spacer">div><span class="menu-bullet"><img src="/kernel/images/arrow.gif" class="menu-bullet">Luxury Flowersspan><div class="spacer">div>a><div class="menuChildren" id="menuChildrencat_2003403">div><a class="menuParent_off" id="parentcat_1000343" href="/catalo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ewanstevenson0