Category Page Outranks Homepage

[PartyStore]

I have an online party store and when I search for broad industry terms: (party supplies & party decorations) I notice that one of my category pages outranks the homepage.  The homepage's Page Authority is better and more external links pointing to the homepage.  Is there s technical SEO problem?  Why would a category page outrank the homepage?

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Homepage authority is almost always going to be better than inner page authority.  That just has to do with natural linking behavior.

From Google's perspective, they want to show the most relevant page to the search.  Presumably, since the inner page has more of the relevant keywords in its URL, Google is saying it would rather send people there.

[PartyStore]

Mark thanks for the response.  When I search for (party supplies or party decorations)  I see competitor's homepages, not their category pages.  Also when I search cheap party supplies then I see the homepage in search results.  It sjust makes me think something technical is going wrong.  Maybe canonicalization?

[RafalJ]

It's because both your homepage and that particular category page are targetting the same keywords and are competing with each other in search results. It's rather rare that category outranks the homepage but it's not impossible. This category page has a lot more text content but also images to sub categories etc Google obviously sees it as more relevant to the search queery/keyword.

I would suggest looking at the homepage if it could be reoptimised for other maybe broader keywords to gain some extra benefits.

[GardenBeet]

Hi

gardenbeet.com had the same problem about 4 years ago - do not be alarmed. It just means that the internal page has (probably) higher value links than the home page .

At the time I was advised to look at my site architecture to ensure the link juice gets distributed around the website (at least as evenly as the home page would redirect the juice)  (not sure if that point is still relevant).