SEO and Internal Pages

[mrodriguez1440]

Howdy Moz Fans (quoting Rand),

I have a weird issue.  I have a site dedicated to criminal defense.  When you Google some crimes, the homepage comes up INSTEAD of the internal page directly related to that type of crime.

However, on other crimes, the more relevant internal page appears.

Obviously, I want the internal page to appear when a particular crime is Googled and NOT the homepage.

Does anyone have an explanation why this happens?

FYI:  I recently moved to WP and used a site map plugin that values the internal pages at 60% (instead of Weebly, which has an auto site map that didn't do that).

Could that be it?  I have repeatedly submitted the internal pages via GWT, but nothing happens.

Thanks.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

Before you moved over to Wordpress, how were your rankings then? Was every page being delivered as expected?

-Andy

[David-Kley]

I understand your want to get the subpages ranking, but let's focus on the positive first.

If your homepage listing is already ranking high repeatedly for different searches, do everything you can to get that listing to stand out. Ratings, reviews, schema mark up, authorship, all of it.

Secondly, what does your internal ranking structure and URLs look like? Do your subpages depict only one type of crime, and does the homepage link to them, other than just in the menu? Does the destination URL match the type of search query being performed?

What about your backlinks? If all of them only point to the homepage, then Google is going to think that is the best resource for users.

[mrodriguez1440]

No, I was not.

[mrodriguez1440]

Hi David,

Thanks for the feedback.

Yes, the interior pages depict only one type of crime, and the homepage links to them (besides just the menu).

The destination URL does NOT match the search query (should I change it so it does?).

The back links point primarily to the homepage (except for the two practice areas that are ranking).

[David-Kley]

"The destination URL does NOT match the search query (should I change it so it does?)."

I would make the URL structure closely matched to the main phrase you are trying to rank for. For example:
On a subpage for "personal injury" you could set up the subpage URL as YOURDOMAIN.com/personal-injury

If you would like me to take a look at it, please provide the site URL. If you decide to do any changes, please remember to do the redirects so that you dont have 404 errors.

"The back links point primarily to the homepage (except for the two practice areas that are ranking)."

I think you kind of answered your own question on this one
The two subpages that are ranking have links pointing at them.

[mrodriguez1440]

Hi David,

Thank you. The site URL is www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com

The page is:  www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com/theft-crimes.html

Thanks again.

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

David has covered some important points already. I wanted to point out that the URL you supplied here (www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com/theft-crimes.html) 301 redirects to http://www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com/san-diego-theft-crimes-attorney.html. Are you using the resolving URL to do any link building (although you say the number of inbound links to the crime pages are very low)?

If there was an older version of some of these pages and you've gone through recent redirects when moving to Wordpress, those new pages / URLs may have a hard time ranking initially.