Why is my privacy policy page ranked highest?

4 replies
  • SEO
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I have a few niche sites with fairly low competition, and a few of them have inner pages ranked highest in the SERP's. Many of them have the disclaimer, privacy policy, or about us page ranked higher than the home page.

What would cause this? I obviously don't build any links to those pages, is my home page article and SEO so bad that a simple privacy policy page is outranking it?
#highest #page #policy #privacy #ranked
  • Profile picture of the author Paul Barber
    Have you analyzed the backlinks to the higher ranking pages to see if someone else has linked to them, perhaps by accident? It did happen on one of our sites.

    Do these secondary pages rank for your targeted keyword or another perhaps long tail one?
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  • Profile picture of the author SamirSM
    These could be a few of the reasons:

    -Your About Us, Privacy Policy and Disclaimer pages must've been linked from the home page

    -These pages must have a higher keyword density (in this case the keyword is your site's name)

    -The home page might not have more than one or two mentions of the site's name.

    The best way to deal with this situation is to link to the home page each time you've mentioned the site's name from those pages, other than mentioning your site's name more in the home page.


    Originally Posted by _sleeper_ View Post

    I have a few niche sites with fairly low competition, and a few of them have inner pages ranked highest in the SERP's. Many of them have the disclaimer, privacy policy, or about us page ranked higher than the home page.

    What would cause this? I obviously don't build any links to those pages, is my home page article and SEO so bad that a simple privacy policy page is outranking it?
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    • Profile picture of the author _sleeper_
      Originally Posted by Paul Barber View Post

      Have you analyzed the backlinks to the higher ranking pages to see if someone else has linked to them, perhaps by accident? It did happen on one of our sites.

      Do these secondary pages rank for your targeted keyword or another perhaps long tail one?
      I checked the backlinks for most of them in yahoo site explorer, and they don't have any external links at all. They are ranking for my target keyword phrase, even though some pages (like privacy policy) don't use the keyword phrase at all in the text!?

      Originally Posted by indihow View Post

      These could be a few of the reasons:

      -Your About Us, Privacy Policy and Disclaimer pages must've been linked from the home page

      -These pages must have a higher keyword density (in this case the keyword is your site's name)

      -The home page might not have more than one or two mentions of the site's name.

      The best way to deal with this situation is to link to the home page each time you've mentioned the site's name from those pages, other than mentioning your site's name more in the home page.
      Thanks for your response, I think the answer may be a combination of your points above. The pages are linked from the home page (of course), but there aren't any external backlinks pointing to them. And I don't think it's keyword density, because the keyword phrase isn't mentioned at all in my privacy policy and only once in the About Us and Disclaimer page.

      I'll re-check my keyword density in the home pages, but I optimize them pretty strictly for SEO.

      I haven't tried linking back to the homepage for every keyword usage in those pages, but I'll give that a shot.
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      • Profile picture of the author _sleeper_
        I checked my keyword density on my home page vs. privacy policy page using SEOBook's Keyword Density Tool on a few of my sites.

        Site 1 Homepage = 1.5% About Us page = 1.46%
        Site 2 Homepage = 2.36% Contact Us page = 1.44%
        Site 3 Homepage = 5.83% Privacy Policy page = 1.3%
        Site 4 Homepage = 2.14% Privacy Policy page = 0%
        Site 5 Homepage = 5.58% Disclaimer page = 0%
        Site 6 Homepage = 7.01% Privacy Policy page = 0%

        I don't see any pattern here that shows me keyword density is the problem, other than it may be too high on some of my home pages. This same thing is occurring on 12 of my sites, what other factors should I be looking at?
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