Do deep pages issues affect homepage chances of ranking?

[EduardoRuiz]

Hello community,

I have a general question: let's say you have some issues in deep pages, like duplicate pages without a canonical tag, or missing description or missing titles, etc..

Will these issues affect the chances of the homepage ranking if the homepage is optimized (no duplicates, canonical, good keywords volume, alt text, etc.) and has none of the issues present in deep pages within the site?

Gracias.

[LesleyPaone]

In my opinion, no they do not. The only thing that I am aware of that works site wide is domain age and domain penalties.

[Andy-Halliday]

in theory nope they don't affect homepage rankings, however as you are aware of these issues is there a reason for not fixing, just because your home page ranks nicely, you would get a lot more long tail traffic if you can get your other pages to rank as well.

Very few transactions on websites happen on a home page, its usually product pages (if ecommerce site), or contact us pages (if its a service page) - so while home page ranking is nice, get the pages that convert to rank as well.

[JaneCopland]

The only way I could imagine this would hurt the home page is if the site structure is terrible enough that its Panda penalty is extremely severe. I can't think of a place where I've seen this "in the wild" though so that's entirely theoretical.