Search Result Brings Up Home Page

[HB17]

Hi all,

I've been looking at some SEO work on our new CMS site that's been up for a few months now and when doing a search for a particular page which I know has good SEO and received a 'B' rating on the MOZ on page grader, our home page shows up and not our relevant page.

I don't exactly want to worsen the SEO on our home page so that it doesn't show up, but why would my home page which is fairly generic and covers a large area of the business show up rather than the specific page which I am searching with exact keywords for?

For example: If I was searching for 'bananas' my home page for fruits would show up rather than my bananas page which has been tailored around those keywords.

Thanks

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

There is a number of factors including relevancy, but also Page Authority. If sites that are relevant about bananas are linking to your home page, Google might assumed that the home page is the most appropriate page for queries relating to bananas.

Also does your 'bananas' page have many links pointing to it, is it included in your sitemap, do you link to the page from your home page.

Without your actual url its quite hard to be specific for the actual reason.

Thanks

Andy

[jlane9]

Andy is right on all accounts.

I would suggest you use the Moz tool bar ( http://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar) and look a the page authority of all the pages on your website. That would be a major indicator of what is going on with the home page ranking over the bananas page.

If the page authority is the problem you should link from some of your higher authority pages to the page you wish to rank ( Bananas page). I would also add some outside links from high authority relevant pages to the bananas page as well. You also may want to look at the titles and descriptions for each page and make sure they are in line with the main keywords you are trying to rank for.

Hope that helps direct your efforts to fix the situation.

joe

[TheeDigital]

Sometimes the links pointing to the homepage make it strong enough that even a slight mention of the words can make it more relevant than the page in the eyes of the search engine. Other times older versions of a page were redirected to the homepage rather than page > page. What also happens sometimes is that duplicate content on a page will cause a page to be hidden in search results and Google will instead return the homepage in its place (usually in a lower position than the page would have been.)