Home Page not Ranking on Local Community Sites

[Wagada]

I am helping out with a couple of community sites and am seeing the same problem on both. They are small non-commercial local websites. One has 5 or 6 relevant links to the home page, and the title tag and content have been optimised for the name of the group and the location (and in any case the phrase is completely non-competitive). The other one has few links and isn't optimised. Both sites are fairly new.

Both sites have the same problem in that when you search for the name of the group, it is not the home page that comes up but another page.

My experience is mainly in the more competitive commercial arena, so I thought that these community sites would be simple! Can anyone point me in the right direction as to why this might be?

No spammy links on either. These are community sites that are not particularly well maintained, but the phrases I am searching for are non-competitive. I have checked that the home pages are not no-indexed.

Any tips much appreciated!

[LauraSultan]

Any chance you can give us the URLs? Otherwise, it's difficult to troubleshoot.  Does this only happen in Google, or do you see it in Bing as well?

Based on what you're saying, I would look first at at a few possible culprits.

• Index Issues - Have you checked to confirm that the home page is indexed by the search engine? Search site:domain.com to check. If not, you may have a technical problem that prevents the
• Internal Link Scheme - Is the other page getting more internal links than the home page, making it seem more important?
• Content - Does the other page have loads more relevant content than the home page?

[GlobeRunner]

Generally speaking, what you're describing is the fact that the sites just don't have enough Domain Authority and links in order to rank well for the keywords you're targeting. If the sites are new, it might take some more time, as they may be "sandboxed". They need to become trusted more.