Canoncial tag for homepage?

[Bigheadigital]

I have a site that gets most of it's traffic from one keyword combination, but I've noticed lately that instead of sending people to the homepage, it's sending people to an internal page.

This isn't a problem, except for the fact that all the best link juice and domain authority has been directed at the homepage.

There's not a lot of content on the homepage, so is it worth setting up a canonical tag on the homepage for this internal page to ensure that the page authority/link juice helps to boost this page that is already being indexed for the keyword?

[MichaelC-15022]

Oh, I think you're asking for trouble if you do that.

Unless your home page is really badly targeted for that keyword, or the internal page has the keyword in the URL and your domain doesn't, or somehow you've built a ton of links to the internal page and NOT the homepage, this is really suspicious, and makes me think that Google might be levying a penalty against your home page.

If that's the case, the canonical tag runs the risk of transferring the penalty

First off, install Chartelligence in your Chrome browser, and then take a look at your Google Analytics to see when the traffic dropped for your home page, and from that, if that lines up with a particular iteration of Panda or Penguin.

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, I tend to agree with Michael. Make sure this isn't an issue with your home-page. Google does seem to be preferring more targeted pages these days, though, and it can happen for a lot of reasons. This is an older post by Rand, but it's still very relevant:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

[Bigheadigital]

Yeah the internal page has the keyword in the url - and it actually has more relevant content. So perhaps it's ok that that page is being ranked, it's just a shame that the homepage has the better page rank, so we're not getting as strong of a ranking as I think we would if the homepage were getting more of the internal links.

Is it a good idea to point internal links from other pages to the homepage instead, when the internal page really has the most relevant content just to try to get a better ranking? I'd say no, right?

[Bigheadigital]

Yeah I'd say that Google is just preferring the internal page over the homepage... the content is more relevant, the keyword is in the url, etc.