Non-optimised pages ranking higher than optimised homepage

[andrew_uba]

I'm a developer working with a dating site and we're having what appear to be unusual ranking behaviour for the keyword "Ukraine Brides".

When searching for "Ukraine Brides" we typically have the top 3 results in Google, however the homepage is almost never ranked #1. Other non-optimised pages appear ahead of it. I believe this is having a negative affect on our conversion rate, so wish to see this resolved.

For instance, if you search here in NZ, the results are typically:

1. Login page (/account/login)
2. Search page (/search)
3. Home page (/)

Similar situation when searching in the US, but typically the top result is the search page.

Is this unusual? We've spent quite a bit of time optimising the homepage, it has more external links, more internal links, better content that targets the keyword, more traffic, etc. Even so, the login and search pages appear higher.

A side note, the average CTR for "Ukraine Brides" is significantly lower than "Ukraine Brides Agency" (20% vs 80% respectively), so I don't think that it's purely a 'brand keyword'.

A few thoughts were:

• The search page is not accessible from the homepage unless you are logged in. Maybe this is causing some sort of linking/seo/ranking issue?
• Re: the login page being higher, perhaps many existing users visit the login page directly from this keyword in order to login straight away so Google pushes this to the top. I think this is less likely because most existing users will be logged in automatically (via cookies "remember me") and the homepage has a login form in anycase
• The site supports multiple languages. Maybe this is causing some canonical issues?
• There was an additional suggestion that we should noindex the login and search pages in order to resolve this ranking issue, but were nervous that we'd lose a large amount of organic clicks if we did this. Google must be doing this for a reason, so we wanted to resolve that underlying reason before dropping the noindex hammer.

The fear is of course that we've done something wrong with our homepage which is causing it to perform poorly and thus these other pages rank higher. The hope would be that if we fixed that, that our rank for other keywords would improve also.

It would be great if we could get some more eyes on this to hopefully confirm we're not doing anything silly, and are just generally after a second opinion.

[andrew_uba]

I've attached some data for the bounce rate and time spent. I segmented by New users, as existing users I'm sure would skew the stats.

The Search page wins out on both. As for the freshness of content, the search page wins again, just by the nature of the content, with new members signing up frequently. I don't really trust GA's page speed metrics; from my tests the too appear comparable with a slight edge again towards the Search page.

I suppose if users are visiting the homepage and then realise they cannot get to the homepage, it could contribute to the bounce rate (and then they may click on the Search result listing). Alternatively though, if Google see users typically going to the Search page immediately, is it more likely to rank that higher to cater to that experience?

Ra0WLAr

[KristinaKledzik]

Wow, yeah, this is weird! For what it's worth, your hreflang tags seem fine, so I'd be surprised if there are canonical issues. And Google has indexed your home page.

Here's what I'd dig into: does Google think visitors want to land on your /search/ page before your homepage? I work on a site that uses a search page as a paid and organic search landing page, and it has the best conversion rate of any page on our site. Is it possible that Google thinks your homepage offers a bad user experience, and your /search/ page offers a better one, so it's picking what it thinks is best?

To see if that could be the case, I'd look into:

• What's the bounce rate of the home  vs /search/ page?
• What's the time spent on page (if you can measure that properly) of each?
• How long do the pages take to load?
• How fresh is the content on the homepage vs search? (I assume the account page is the most boring.)

If this is the case, you may want to consider letting visitors search, then requiring a registration.

Good luck! And let us know what you find out!

Kristina