Landing pages rank higher thank home page

[anthonytjm]

Ive been tasked to work on several sites from a client that had some shady past seo work done for them. Weak content, tons of useless links all pointing to home page, etc. Ive gone through site and given a total re-write and worked on removing and dissavowing links.

Majority of the sites home page ranked high on first page google. Now the sites are closer to 100 rank than first page, and the odd thing is that home page cant be found but pages like terms and conditions or disclaimer are ranking. These pages have hardly no content compared to home pages, and while they are still ranked 80 to 100 positions back they are ranking while the home page cant be found.

We have tried changing anchor text to "click here", and "for more info" instead of keyword and nothing much changed yet. Competition still has pretty much keyword anchor text and worthless links and they still rank well.

Am I wasting time with rewrites and link dissavows or should I continue and eventually get the sites home page to come back on the radar? We have added social media presence and a blog that we post to regularly and for 6 months of work have hardly seen a dent for improved rankings.

Am I on the right page or spinning my wheels? Any advise is appreciated.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Hi Anthony,

It sounds like your on the right path.  Make sure the site has good, quality, optimized content.  Analyze the link profile and deal with the issues you find.  Create new quality content that is remarkable and get it in front of people via social networks, guest blogging, etc.

It's not a quick process, though.  It sounds like the site you are working on was in pretty bad shape, dealing with both Panda and Penguin issues, including spammy links and over-optimized anchor text.  It's a lot to fix and Google doesn't just bounce you right back to where you were.  First, Google wants to see that you are really back on the straight and narrow and aren't going to try any more spammy stuff.  Secondly, the rankings the site had before weren't legit.  The site had them because of manipulative strategies which are no longer working.  Think of it this way...

If I weighed 250 lbs and I wanted to lose weight.  If, instead of working out and eating right, I decided to lose weight by adjusting the scale and I adjust it to the point where it says I weigh 200 lbs. The scale may indicate I'm losing weight, but I'm not.  It's fake.  If someone then comes in and fixes the scale so it can't be adjusted, I shouldn't expect that the scale would still say I'm 200 lbs because that wasn't real.  It'll say I way 250 lbs (or may more).  In a similar way, if you manipulate the search engines to give certain rankings instead of getting those rankings by creating great content and getting links naturally, then when the search engines change so you can't manipulate them anymore, you shouldn't expect to keep those fake rankings.  You'll be back to where you were at the start, possibly worse off if you get penalized.

So, you are on the right path, but you (and your client) need to have the proper expectations.  You may have more issues to deal with and you probably need to be creating new, remarkable content so people will share/like/link the content and build the site's authority up...the right way.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Anthony

Kurt's answer was pretty dead on (thanks Kurt!).

Just want to add some more detail about the disavow specifically. We've been told by John Muller in some of his Google Hangouts (he works on the webmaster tools team) that the disavow can take up to 6 months to fully take effect. This is because Google has to have crawled all the domains/pages in the disavow file, based upon their own crawl schedule (having nothing to do with when you submit the file). As they crawl the disavowed URLs, they then add a nofollow basically on those links.

Sounds like you're doing the right things! I would also think about being sure to try to get traffic from other places in the meantime, even paid. I have heard John also suggest that you can start testing page quality with PPC traffic. I also believe evidence of other traffic sources, especially social, will help any site recover much more quickly.