Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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://mza.bundledseo.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.

I've been working on SEO for a local website for a few years, last year a new competitor has popped up and started kicking my tail.  So I figured I would pose the question and see if someone could point me in a different more helpful direction.  I'm mainly stumped as to why the newer competitor has a higher DA and PA when I look at his link profile and lack of website content. A few Comparison notes Competitor is using SSL on the entire site. I am not (Checkmark for him) Competitor has a spam score of 8 out of 17 I have a 1 out of 17 (Checkmark for me) Competitor has a DA of 18 - My DA is 17 (Checkmark for him) Competitor has a PA of 32 - My PA is 28 (Checkmark for him) My Established Link Domains 14 and 127 Links.  Also the PA and DA of my external links are much better than the competitor. Competitor has Established Link Domains 9 and 30 Links Also the PA and DA of my external links are much better than the competitor.  (Checkmark for me) I have created around 50 custom blog articles along with the pages on my site he has 0 and only 5 pages indexed by Google. (Checkmark for me) The major issue when I do a comparison on OSE is that he has more external links and external equity passing links even though the links are very low value.