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Homepage outranked by sub pages - reason for concern?
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Hey All,
trying to figure out how concerned I should be about this. So here is the scoop, would appreciate your thoughts.
We have several eCommerce websites that have been affected by Panda, do to content from manufacturers and lack of original content. We have been working hard to write our own descriptions and are seeing an increase in traffic again. We have also been writing blogs since February and are getting a lot of visits to them.
Here is the problem, our blog pages are now outranking our homepage when you type in site:domain-name
Is this a problem? our home page does not show up until you are 3 pages in. However when you type in just our domain name in google as a search it does show up in position one with sitelinks under it.
This is happening across both of our sites. Is this a cause for concern or just natural due to our blogs being more popular than our homepage.
Thanks!
Josh
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Is your blog hosted on a subdomain?
Personally I have noticed that Panda is sitewide but the subdomains might remain unaffected. In our case, our ecommerce site with 6,000+ pages got affected but the blog (subdomain) actually increased in traffic due to better content, more social signals and other factors.
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Thanks for the response. It is nice to hear from someone else who has the same type of site and sees the same thing. Appreciate the tip and the response.
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I would be concerned if the home page didn't appear, but I'm not sure whether it matters that it is getting outranked by blog pages. We have eCommerce sites and added blogs to a couple of them around February. Most of the time the blogs seem to support the rankings of the pages they are written to funnel traffic towards, but sometimes they will outrank them. Google seems to love the fresh content, but when blogs outrank other more relevant pages I find there is usually an issue with on-page optimisation.
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Please take the time to read this page, it has a calculator you can play with also, it will make things clearer I'm sure
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html -
Hi Joshua.
There is no concern at all with internal pages outranking your home page. It can be perfectly natural.
Let's say you have a site about...well, almost anything. Today you perform an interview with the President and talk about...well, almost anything. You publish that interview on your site. Overnight that interview will probably attract thousands of links causing that page to be the most linked page on your site. There is nothing wrong with that result.
You can try to sculpt your PR within your site a bit. You can say hey, I have a ton of PR on this one page and I want to move some of it to my latest or most profitable products. In that case, you can add a sidebar to the page with "latest products" or "featured products". You may also be able to sneak in a few anchor text links within the content itself depending on how the interview progressed.
A video which may help: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qigo05nAqKw
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Thanks Alan,
that helps and you might have pointed something there. Our site has lots of links on each page and each page basically links to the same pages which would keep everything pretty even. Structure is something that we are working on. I wonder if that is part of the problem.
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When searching for site:mydomain.com i also asume that it is in order of rank, but i cant say i know that for a fact.
I would look at my internal linking
do all pages link back to home page, do they liink back to mydomain.com recommended or mydomain.com/default.htm
do you have a full sitemap on every page, I recommend not.
If every page links to every other page, this keeps link juice even on every page, when really you want to give your home page or landing pages prominence.
The best structure is flat, home page links to every page, and every page links back to home page and landing pages if you have them.
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