Site Audit: Indexed Pages Issue

[SEO_Matt]

Over the last couple of months I've been working through some issues with a client.  One of my starting points was doing a site Audit.  I'm following a post written by Geoff Kenyon https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 .

One of the main issues of the site audit seems to be that when I run a "site:domain.com" query in Google my homepage isn't the first page listed in fact it isn't listed in this search when I go through all of the listings.  I understand that it isn't required to have your homepage listed first when running this type of query, but I would prefer it.

Here are some things I've done

• I ran another query "info:homepage.com" and the home page is indexed by Google.
• When I run a branded search for the company name the home page does come up first.
• The current page that is showing up first in the "site:domain.com" listing is my blog index page.
• Several months back I redirected the index.php page to the root of the domain.  Not sure if this is helping or hurting.
• In the sitemap I removed the index.php and left only the root domain as the page to index.
• Also all interior links are sent to the root, index.php has been eliminated from all internal links everything links to root
• The main site navigation does not refer to the "Home" page, but instead my logo is the link to the Home page.
• Should I noindex my blog/index.php page?  This page is only a compilation of posts and does not have any original content instead it actually throws up duplicate content warnings.

Any help would be much appreciated.  I apologize if this is a silly question, but I'm getting frustrated/ annoyed at the whole situation.

[seoman10]

Few quick thoughts come to mind (in order of priority)

1. Blog page may have more authority than the homepage
2. Could be a technical issue with the homepage (Maybe Google can't see anything there)
3. Check your robots.txt to make sure it's not blocked (Sounds crazy but can happen)

I would strongly advise against noindexing unless it is absolutely necessary.

Personally I wouldn't be too worried about the homepage not showing although, I agree it's a good idea to know why.  After all no customers are going to be using Google search parameters like site or info.  They are going to be searching for what they want and expecting an answer on the page that Google provides them with.

Not sure if that helps or not but just a few thoughts.

[SEO_Matt]

Seoman,

Thanks for the response.  I appreciate any and all suggestions

• Blog page has a page authority of 1 out of 100 the home page has a page authority of 33 out of 100
• I looked at google's cache for pages and reviewed the text only version and everything is showing.
• Checked robots and I'm disallowing certain directories that I don't want indexed or crawled but those are all in order and I tested the robots.txt just to make sure it was written properly and it came back clean.

I don't believe noindexing my blog page is absolutely necessary, but I'm kind of wondering if Google thinks that it is my home page instead of my regular root directory?  I know it sounds a little weird but I'm wondering if something is confusing the spiders.   Thanks again for your time and thoughts.

[seoman10]

Anyway you could let me have the two links and I can give them a quick look over?

Also bear in mind that DA isn't everything.

[SEO_Matt]

Feel free to take a look www.denverilluminations.com & www.denverilluminations.com/_blog/ .

Also the domain authority is 19 for the site I was looking at the individual page authorities.  Thanks again Seoman.

[seoman10]

Apologies I'd slightly misunderstood your question, I see exactly what you mean now.  I think this is purely down to the way Google associates the search intent and tries to deliver the most appropriate result.

The site parameter is obviously intended to help users find a specific item on the specified site, therefore if the blog has more content than the other pages there is more chance that it will have what the user is looking for hence Google will deliver that page out of preference.
Don't know for sure but just an assumption.

As you said branded searches are fine, there certainly doesn't look to be any issues as far as I can see although I haven't done a full audit.

Would be interested to see what anyone else says but my gut feeling is there is nothing to be worried about, the main thing is you come up for your company name and search terms that you want.

Sorry hope that helps somewhat.

All the best

[SEO_Matt]

Thanks Seoman,

That was why I was wondering if I should noindex the blog index page.  It is purely a listing of blog entries and not original content.  It seems to throw up duplicate content issues and Google seems to give it the most page power on the site even though it is not my most important page.

I would want Google to still follow all of the links because those are the blog posts and the original content.  I don't know if the noindex is the best choice but I think it at least it would tell Google "Hey guys the blog page is not my most important page.  In fact it is just a compilation of posts"

I haven't pulled the trigger on it yet, because I don't know if it will hurt me more than it is helping.  I just don't know.  If anyone has any other thoughts on the noindex of the blog index page which is not my home page feel free to drop me a line.