Why is Google sending traffic to our homepage, not our optimized pages?

[pano]

Hello Forum,

My team and I just completely redid a yoga eCommerce site, including its SEO. The old version of the site didn't feature page-specific optimization and, as a result, Google's search results for our keywords almost always directed visitors to the homepage.

For example, a Google search for the term "yoga bolster" sent users to the homepage, not the product category page for yoga bolsters.

After redoing the site and optimizing specific pages (i.e. the yoga bolster page is now optimized for the keyword "yoga bolster"), the Google search results are still taking users to the homepage, not the optimized page. (i.e. if you search for yoga bolster, find our search result, and click the search result link, you're taken to the homepage, not the bolster page)

It's only been about 36 hours since we've launched the new website and submitted it to Google's webmaster tools.

Does anyone know why Google is still sending people to our homepage and not the keyword-optimized pages we created? Is this a timing issue?

[SimonCullum]

Hi Pano

Timing is one issue, it will take longer. First the pages need to be indexed which can take much longer than 36 hours for some websites, then the pages need to be ranked for their targeted keywords. You say it's a new website, in which case this would be the case. If the URLs are the same as before, then just a reindexing delay and the ranking factors.

Though the Main Reason will be that your internal product/landing pages most probably do not have any (or any good quality) inbound links to them, chances they are all going to your homepage. I'd suggest looking at this as links are a major ranking factor.

So take a look at the on-page SEO again to ensure that it's as strong as can be, then analyse your inbound link situation and if necessary, get some high quality relevant links from reputable websites to link into your internal pages (though don't pay for the links, free natural links are the way to go).

Also, make sure that visitors and search spiders can easily navigate to your internal pages that you are trying to get ranked, have a check for any crawl errors and make sure that your robots.txt file is not disallowing any such pages from being indexed.

Regards, Simon

[Jinx14678]

Within 36 hours it is definitely a timing issue at this point, but cannot say for sure that in the long term it will sort itself out.

There are many other things to take into consideration other than just META and onpage optimized content.

You would also want to do a high quality informational link building campaign that uses (gracefully) the anchor text "yoga bolster" to this newly optimized page. There is also internal linking you can do that would help re-inforce this directive to Google.

w00t!