Need advice as to why my homepage isn't ranking but inner pages are....

[MattAdamo]

Hey guys,

I started a niche site a few weeks ago and as i've been writing new content it's been starting to show up in the serps.

Currently i'm targeting 10 keywords (my homepage is a static page targeting my main keyword) and one post for the other 9. All of the 9 posts (which are inner pages) are all ranking in the top 100 for that respective keyword.

However...

My homepage isn't even in the top 1000. I know my site is new but why are the inner pages showing up and not the homepage.

The homepage is indexed though, when i use the google "site:" feature, it shows up. And if i search my website in quotes it shows up to.

Granted the competition is medium-difficult, The top 100 results has spun articles and youtube vids/other crappy links. I should at least be in the top 1000...

As a side note, the homepage is a 1700 word post with only 2% keyword density. The only thing i have in the sidebar is a menu with the posts in them. (i dont even have a link to the homepage there) And then a link in the footer with my homepage and my keyword as the anchor text.

If anyone has any experience with this/ has any advice please help. Thanks

[kaedus]

Have you built any links? How is your on-page SEO? Have you interlinked your pages?

Here is what I recommend. Make sure your homepage is well optimized for the main keyword. Have that keyword in your title tags, your heading tags (h1, h2, etc) and within your content. Also if you have pictures on your home page make the alt text also contain your keyword.

Once you accomplish that, you should then interlink your pages. For the content on your inner pages, make sure that you have a link within the content of your keyword back to your home page.

For example, on an inner page you have a sentence like this:
"This is an awesome piece of content I'm writing that contains my keyword."
And have keyword be a link back to your home page.

If you do all that, once Google crawls your pages again you'll be letting it know that your home page is the most relevant for that keyword. Best of luck!

[MattAdamo]

Originally Posted by kaedus

Have you built any links? How is your on-page SEO? Have you interlinked your pages?

Here is what I recommend. Make sure your homepage is well optimized for the main keyword. Have that keyword in your title tags, your heading tags (h1, h2, etc) and within your content. Also if you have pictures on your home page make the alt text also contain your keyword.

Once you accomplish that, you should then interlink your pages. For the content on your inner pages, make sure that you have a link within the content of your keyword back to your home page.

For example, on an inner page you have a sentence like this:
"This is an awesome piece of content I'm writing that contains my keyword."
And have keyword be a link back to your home page.

If you do all that, once Google crawls your pages again you'll be letting it know that your home page is the most relevant for that keyword. Best of luck!

Thanks for the tips,

The sad part is, i've already done all of that. I'm using SEOPressor and got a 100% for the post. And 6 of the 9 inner posts have links back to the homepage with anchor text as my main keyword.

I wonder if google sandboxed just my main homepage..

[yukon]

Does your Index page include the NOINDEX tag in the source code?

If you need help checking, PM the link,

[MattAdamo]

Originally Posted by yukon

Does your Index page include the NOINDEX tag in the source code?

If you need help checking, PM the link,

Thanks for the offer,

but i just ran it through traffic travis/checked stats on the page and it doesn't have the noindex tag on it.

Originally Posted by aeros

is your domain an exact match dot com? if so perhaps your competition for that keyword is just a bit higher than the others, how bout some more backlinks, just a matter of time i'd say. I have had this happen to sites of mine too.

And, it has the word "center" after the keyword so its not a true emd, but yea. I'm hoping in time it will just eventually rank...

[Srinagarhouseboats]

It always happens with new site . Inner page got better ranking than index page .
Create more backlink and make index more seo friendly than inner posts to get ranked

[glennforum]

It might be that your inner page contents are relevant to the keywords and contains such relevant keywords more than your homepage. Try creating more backlinks for your homepage but this time ensure quality backlinks.

[Chris Sweeney]

I'm actually having the same problem with like 20 of my sites. During the QDF period, my homepages were in one of the top 3 spots for each sites' target keyword, and they were making good money. But now that the "freshness factor" has worn off, those 20 or so homepages aren't ranked for the keyword, but the Privacy Policy page, the About Us page, the Contact Us page, and other irrelevant inner pages are the sites' highest ranked pages at like 100-200. Everything in Webmaster Tools looks fine. Internal linking is fine as far I can tell. Any suggestions or similar experiences?

[nik0]

I'm experiencing somewhat of the same problem with a fairly new site (1 month old).

I created highly optimized landingpages with solid internal linking from the homepage with the right anchor txt and pretty decent quality backlinks from Build My Rank and the High PR society. Solid but not overdone onpage seo like h1, h2, title, url, bold, underlined, 2% density.

And what happens? These pages are nowhere to be seen in the search engines but instead totally non optimized tagpages with 0 backlinks and the homepage itself are showing up on page 2 till page 6 for these keyphrases while the keyphrase that I talk about is only shown maybe once or twice on these pages.

It feels like Google is playing a game with me. I build and rank websites for quiet a long time but only uptill recently I am noticing this odd behaviour in the serps. It feels like the new alghorytm updates have some mayor bugs.

To add: My established sites don't experience this, they are as stable as always and not a single site got affected by any of the panda updates. For this new site I use a similiar style of on/offpage seo like I always do.

The only similartiy that I see with the above posters is that Google is ranking totally unrelevant pages above optimized pages with solid backlinking.

[nik0]

Something else that I'm experiencing lately is that a page at another site of mine is nowhere showing up for the keyword but instead all the tier1 property's like web2.0 and a youtube video are heavily outranking it for that keyword. Precisely I have 3 web2.0's and 1 youtube video ranking at page 4 till 7 while the page that needs to be ranked is not even in the top 1000.

The ranking method I used for this page is a linkpyramid of 10 web2.0's, a youtube video, bunch of bookmarks, about 50 blogcomments, 10 high PR blogcomments and a dozen articles at autoapprove sites (not 100's). These are my tier1 links that I heavily blasted with > 50.000 blogcomments.

[maricelu]

Has anyone managed this so far? It looks I am having the same problem with my new site - My " Sample Page " page from Wordpress is on the 6th page on Google but my index is simply NOWHERE.

[marieluy143]

- check your homepage codes - HTML error free The W3C Markup Validation Service
- be sure to apply the basic SEO (Meta Tags, Keywords, Title, Description)
- webmasters tools and Google Analytics
- Unique Homepage Content

Optional
- G+, Facebook Like, Twitter etc.

[PriceMaster]

I have the same problem as you but it is the opposite.

My home page gets indexed almost instantly and shows for all the keywords I use.

On the other hand my Inner Pages with the actual content don't show as much as compared to my HomePage for the keywords...

Any suggestions?

[MikeWike]

Listen,

I had exactly the same problem for my very first IM site. I built links, but suddenly my homepage disappeared from google SERPs as well as the main keywords. It was gone for 1,5 months! I was about to give up, but then I started to gather information for that. I'm not sure why it got off from the SERPS, but this is what I did and it came back! (now ranking 1st for the specific keyword):

1) Added new, fresh content weekly
2) Made more backlinks (10 per day + few fiverr gigs)
3) Varied more anchor text for my backlinks
4) Lowered keyword density on the main page (also from the images)
5) Removed all the HTML errors