What to do when your home page an index for a series of pages.
-
I have created an index stack. My home page is http://www.southernwhitewater.com
The home page is the index itself and the 1st page http://www.southernwhitewater.com/nz-adventure-tours-whitewater-river-rafting-hunting-fishing
My home page (if your look at it through moz bat for chrome bar} incorporates all the pages in the index. Is this Bad? I would prefer to index each page separately. As per my site index in the footer
What is the best way to optimize all these pages individually and still have the customers arrive at the top to a picture. rel= canonical?
Any help would be great!!
-
HI Rod,
That should have fixed your duplicate content problem.
-
Hi Don, I have made those changes now.
I still have an index for my home page, but it is; a banner, 2 text pages and a gallery page. If you look at the index though the Moz bar you can see that the H1 & H2 titles have information from the whole index as if it is one long single page.
Rod B
-
Thanks Moosa
Yes I have just put this up and went a little OTT on the urls. I will pull strip them back shortly.
No, the index (index stack) is about the individual pages stacked down a page with no submenu, as opposed to the site index in the footer. The footer shows how to get to the individual pages by themselves the same way you would in a drop down menu.
-
Thanks Don
Good answer and I appreciate the detail. I have been assured that the individual content will not be seen by google as duplicate by the creators, but I am not entirely convinced, and have come to a similar conclusion to you and will be pulling away the home page and making a link across to an index of the services pages. I have a client who is very particular about the look. Most will understand the trade-off between plenty of above the fold content, and keeping the opening image clean picturesque and minimalistic.
I will let you know when its finished. I would like to hear from other people who stack pages in an index as opposed to a drop-down menu or sub-navigation. This design seems to be quite good for tablets where scrolling is easy and loading pages is slower. (another trade of between desktops and tablets)
I will be testing a change from one configuration to other to see if the performance improves or not on some of my other sites. Nothing like an a/b split to put the mind at rest.
-
Hi Rod,
I will try address the 2 questions I see here.
1. Is an "index stack" bad for your site.
2. How do I optimize my site.1. Index Stack, okay to be completely honest I have never heard the term before. However, with the link you provided I was able to understand what you mean. In such case you have taken the content of your sub-pages and placed them directly on your home page. Is this bad.. YES!
The reason why this is bad is because it is creating duplicate content. This is bad because the page that should be ranking for X content is now competing with your home page for these rankings. Your home page should be about your business and services, what you do, and how you do it. The sub-pages are your re-enforcement they support the content stated on your homepage.
Imagine a beautiful hotel. The outside is adorned in the finest materials of the time, well maintained and awe inspiring. A equally impressive doorway beacons you to come in. As you do, you find yourself in the lobby. Well placed pristine signs detail some of the hotel's offerings, private gym's, hot tubs, saunas, massage, 5 star dinning, dance halls, and judging by the impressive lobby you have no doubt these offerings will be spectacular.
In this example the lobby is your homepage an impressive list of the offerings guest will find inside. What you don't see is a middle-aged fat man sprawled out in the lobby getting a massage. Which is what your index stack is doing.
2. How to optimize (fix it). To fix this you'll want to structure you home page to be about your business, and services. High level overviews of what you offer, with strong brand placement.
The purpose of the homepage is to make it clear what you do, how you do it, why people love it, and in general more about your brand. The purpose of your inner pages is to completely detail the particular service or products, with call to action to convert interest into money.
I would remove the internal page content from the homepage, and focus again more on an overview. Essentially cut out everything between the Hunting & Gathering Club, and the Call to Action "There's a Southern Whitewater Experience for everyone". Beef up the links to the internal pages by making them look more attractive and obvious.
There are other things that may need addressed as well, but I hope this answers your primary question,
Don
-
Your question is kind of confusing to me but if you are asking about having all internal links on the home page. This is fine. I take a quick look of your website and from the indexing point of view it looks just fine to me!
Although your URLs are very much over optimized it will not take more than a second for one to realize that you are pushing SEO here. I think this is not really a very good idea so my advice is to optimize your URLs and make it SEO friendly instead of inserting your keywords in to it.
If you are asking something different, I would love if you can elaborate your question a bit more.
Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will google be able to crawl all of the pages given that the pages displayed or the info on a page varies according to the city of a user?
So the website I am working for asks for a location before displaying the product pages. There are two cities with multiple warehouses. Based on the users' location, the product pages available in the warehouse serving only in that area are shown. If the user skips location, default warehouse-related product pages are shown. The APIs are all location-based.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Airlift0 -
Prioritise a page in Google/why is a well-optimised page not ranking
Hello I'm new to Moz Forums and was wondering if anyone out there could help with a query. My client has an ecommerce site selling a range of pet products, most of which have multiple items in the range for difference size animals i.e. [Product name] for small dog
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LauraSorrelle
[Product name] for medium dog
[Product name] for large dog
[Product name] for extra large dog I've got some really great rankings (top 3) for many keyword searches such as
'[product name] for dogs'
'[product name]' But these rankings are for individual product pages, meaning the user is taken to a small dog product page when they might have a large dog or visa versa. I felt it would be better for the users (and for conversions and bounce rates), if there was a group page which showed all products in the range which I could target keywords '[product name]', '[product name] for dogs'. The page would link through the the individual product pages. I created some group pages in autumn last year to trial this and, although they are well-optimised (score of 98 on Moz's optimisation tool), they are not ranking well. They are indexed, but way down the SERPs. The same group page format has been used for the PPC campaign and the difference to the retention/conversion of visitors is significant. Why are my group pages not ranking? Is it because my client's site already has good rankings for the target term and Google does not want to show another page of the site and muddy results?
Is there a way to prioritise the group page in Google's eyes? Or bring it to Google's attention? Any suggestions/advice welcome. Thanks in advance Laura0 -
Indexed Answer Box Result Leads to a 404 page?
Hey everyone, One of my clients is currently getting an answer box (people also ask) result for a page that is no longer live. They migrated their site approximately 6 months ago, and the old page is for some reason still indexed in the (people also asked) results. Weird thing is that this page leads to a 404 error. Why the heck is Google showing this? Are there separate indexes for "people also asked" results, and regular organic listings? Has anyone ever seen/experienced something like this before? Any insight would is much appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HSawhney0 -
"No Index, No Follow" or No Index, Follow" for URLs with Thin Content?
Greetings MOZ community: If I have a site with about 200 thin content pages that I want Google to remove from their index, should I set them to "No Index, No Follow" or to "No Index, Follow"? My SEO firm has advised me to set them to "No Index, Follow" but on a recent MOZ help forum post someone suggested "No Index, No Follow". The MOZ poster said that telling Google the content was should not be indexed but the links should be followed was inconstant and could get me into trouble. This make a lot of sense. What is proper form? As background, I think I have recently been hit with a Panda 4.0 penalty for thin content. I have several hundred URLs with less than 50 words and want them de-indexed. My site is a commercial real estate site and the listings apparently have too little content. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Home Page Got Indexed as httpS and Rankings Went Down.
Hello fellow SEO's About 3 weeks ago all of a sudden the home page on our Magento based website went down in rankings (from top 10 to page 3-4 Google) and was showing as httpS - instead of usual http. It first happened with just a few keywords and a week later any search phrase was returning the httpS result for the home page. When I view cache for the home page now it (both http and httpS versions) it gives me this http://clip2net.com/s/2OtPS We are not blocking anything in robots.txt Robots tags are set to index,follow There are hardly any external links pointing at the home pages as httpS This only affected the home page - all other pages rank where they used to and appear as http Has anybody ever had a similar problem? Thanks in advance for your thoughts and help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ddseo0 -
What Sources to use to compile an as comprehensive list of pages indexed in Google?
As part of a Panda recovery initiative we are trying to get an as comprehensive list of currently URLs indexed by Google as possible. Using the site:domain.com operator Google displays that approximately 21k pages are indexed. Scraping the results however ends after the listing of 240 links. Are there any other sources we could be using to make the list more comprehensive? To be clear, we are not looking for external crawlers like the SEOmoz crawl tool but sources that would be confidently allow us to determine a list of URLs currently hold in the Google index. Thank you /Thomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sp800 -
Webmaster Index Page significant drop
Has anyone noticed a significant drop in indexed pages within their Google Webmaster Tools sitemap area? We went from 1300 to 83 from Friday June 23 to today June 25, 2012 and no errors are showing or warnings. Please let me know if anyone else is experiencing this and suggestions to fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | datadirect0 -
Pop Up Pages Being Indexed, Seen As Duplicate Content
I offer users the opportunity to email and embed images from my website. (See this page http://www.andertoons.com/cartoon/6246/ and look under the large image for "Email to a Friend" and "Get Embed HTML" links.) But I'm seeing the ensuing pop-up pages (Ex: http://www.andertoons.com/embed/5231/?KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=370&width=700&modal=true and http://www.andertoons.com/email/6246/?KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=432&width=700&modal=true) showing up in Google. Even worse, I think they're seen as duplicate content. How should I deal with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andertoons0