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
-
Shopify Website Page Indexing issue
Hi, I am working on an eCommerce website on Shopify.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bhisshaun
When I tried Indexing my newly created service pages. The pages are not getting indexed on Google.
I also tried manual indexing of each page and submitted a sitemap but still, the issue doesn't seem to be resolved. Thanks0 -
Will Reducing Number of Low Page Authority Page Increase Domain Authority?
Our commercial real estate site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) contains about 800 URLs. Since 2012 the domain authority has dropped from 35 to about 20. Ranking and traffic dropped significantly since then. The site has about 791 URLs. Many are set to noindex. A large percentage of these pages have a Moz page authority of only "1". It is puzzling that some pages that have similar content to "1" page rank pages rank much better, in some cases "15". If we remove or consolidate the poorly ranked pages will the overall page authority and ranking of the site improve? Would taking the following steps help?: 1. Remove or consolidate poorly ranking unnecessary URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Update content on poorly ranking URLs that are important?
3. Create internal text links (as opposed to links from menus) to critical pages? A MOZ crawl of our site's URLs is visible at the link below. I am wondering if the structure of the site is just not optimized for ranking and what can be done to improve it. THANKS. https://www.dropbox.com/s/oqchfqveelm1q11/CRAWL www.nyc-officespace-leader.com (1).csv?dl=0 Thanks,
Alan0 -
Base copy on 1 page, then adding a bit more for another page - potential duplicate content. What to do?
Hi all, We're creating a section for a client that is based on road trips - for example, New York to Toronto. We have a 3 day trip, a 5 day trip, a 7 day trip and a 10 day trip. The 3 day trip is the base, and then for the 5 day trip, we add another couple of stops, for the 7 day trip, we add a couple more stops and then for the 10 day trip, there might be two or three times the number of stops of the initial 3 day trip. However, the base content is similar - you start at New York, you finish in Toronto, you likely go through Niagara on all trips. It's not exact duplicate content, but it's similar content. I'm not sure how to look after it? The thoughts we have are:1) Use canonical tags 3,5,7 day trips to the 10 day trip.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalhothouse
2) It's not exactly duplicate content, so just go with the content as it is We don't want to get hit by any penalty for duplicate content so just want to work out what you guys think is the best way to go about this. Thanks in advance!0 -
Should I set up no index no follow on low quality pages?
I know it is a good idea for duplicate pages, blog tags, etc. but I remember somewhere that you can help the overall link juice of a website by adding no index no follow or no index follow low quality content pages of your website. Is it still a good idea to do this or was it never a good idea to begin with? Michael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael_Rock0 -
Link Removal Request Sent to Google, Bad Pages Gone from Index But Still Appear in Webmaster Tools
| On June 14th the number of indexed pages for our website on Google Webmaster tools increased from 676 to 851 pages. Our ranking and traffic have taken a big hit since then. The increase in indexed pages is linked to a design upgrade of our website. The upgrade was made June 6th. No new URLS were added. A few forms were changed, the sidebar and header were redesigned. Also, Google Tag Manager was added to the site. My SEO provider, a reputable firm endorsed by MOZ, believes the extra 175 pages indexed by Google, pages that do not offer much content, may be causing the ranking decline. My developer submitted a page removal request to Google via Webmaster tools around June 20th. Now when a Google search is done for site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com 851 results display. Would these extra pages cause a drop in ranking? My developer issued a link removal request for these pages around June 20th and the number in the Google search results appeared to drop to 451 for a few days, now it is back up to 851. In Google Webmaster Tools it is still listed as 851 pages. My ranking drop more and more everyday. At the end of displayed Google Search Results for site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.comvery strange URSL are displaying like:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/... If we can get rid of these issues should ranking return to what it was before?I suspect this is an issue with sitemaps and Robot text. Are there any firms or coders who specialize in this? My developer has really dropped the ball. Thanks everyone!! Alan |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Should We Add the W3.org Language Tag To Every Page Or Just The Home Page?
Greetings, We have five international sites around the world, two of which are in difference languages. Currently we have the following line of html code on the home page of each of the sites: Clearly, we need to change the "en" portion for the sites that aren't in English, but, should we include that meta tag in each of the site's pages, or will the home page suffice. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CSawatzky0 -
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona0 -
Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors
Hi, I'm new to SeoMoz and to this forum. I've started a new campaign on my site and got back loads of error. Most of them are Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors. I know I have some duplicate titles but I don't have any duplicate content. I'm not a web developer and not so expert but I have the impression that the crawler is following all my internal links (Infact I have also plenty of warnings saying "Too many on-page links". Do you think this is the cause of my errors? Should I implement the nofollow on all internal links? I'm working with Joomla. Thanks a lot for your help Marco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcodublin0