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Harder to rank root domain than deeper page?

by Bryan V
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I'm finding about 1/2 of my sites cannot get the root EMD ranked. It's been months and the root domain (EMD) won't get ranked anywhere within the top 100. It shows another page that I wasn't backlinking in the SERP, at rank 150, or 200+ instead.

However, other inner pages seem to get ranked more easily for the chosen search term even though the top 10 competition looks exactly the same to me.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

I'm thinking about moving my content created for the root to another page, and filling in the root with some other info.
#deeper #domain #harder #page #rank #root
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
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    • Profile picture of the author Bryan V
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      Are you blocking Google on your Index page (noindex tag, robots.txt, or a wrong canonical tag)
      They are indexed--they show when I type site:URL.com into google.

      Not sure about the canonical tag.. I'm using Platinum SEO plugin for WP and have "canonical urls" checked. Looking into this...
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  • Profile picture of the author auradev
    I've found that the root domain will rank on the really competitive keywords and that specific pages will rank on the long tail keywords.

    This could just be because of the nature of the content on my site though.

    I would look at what comes up in the SERPs. Are all the other sites just the root domain?
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    • Profile picture of the author Bryan V
      Originally Posted by auradev View Post

      I've found that the root domain will rank on the really competitive keywords and that specific pages will rank on the long tail keywords.

      This could just be because of the nature of the content on my site though.

      I would look at what comes up in the SERPs. Are all the other sites just the root domain?

      Usually 1 or none on the top 10 are the root domain of the ranked site. The rest are big authority sites, so they rank that word on a subpage of their site.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
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    • Profile picture of the author Bryan V
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      How many backlinks on the Index page compared to all the other already ranking pages?

      How many <h1> tags on the Index page?

      The way I setup all my Index pages for my own sites is:

      1) Index page main keyword wrapped in <h1> that's the only <h1> on the Index page.

      2) All other blog post Titles on the Index page get wrapped in <h2>

      The reason I do this is to tell Google my main keyword is the most important text on the Index page (also in the Index page Title), this never changes.

      All the <h2> Titles on the Index page will keep changing everytime a new blog post is posted.
      There's always only one H1 tag on the page which is the title of the post/page. However it appears after the header site title which is wrapped in H2.

      For backlinks (YSE results):
      Some have about 60 showing links to the root with 10-60 to the rest of the pages.
      Some have 100, 300, 600 links to the root and 20-60 to the subpages.

      Sometimes it seems like the root is unaffected by backlinks, while any other subpages responds to them pretty well. Those that can't rank in google seem to do well in Yahoo though.. strange.

      Going to try to throw more links at the entire site and see what happens.
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      • Profile picture of the author Boris_yo
        • I had website that was jumping between #5 and #180 for 6 months and finally settled on #5.
        • I had websites that had their inner pages indexed but root domain was not indexed. I think with time it gets indexed.
        • I had websites that had their root domain indexed but some inner pages were not indexed. I think with time they get indexed.
        • I had websites that were fully indexed but only inner pages were ranking and not root domain.
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