Why Are All Internal Pages Ranked Except My Homepage?

[Casinorep]

Hey guys, I notice that in google search console, it shows that most of the internal pages of a site I'm doing SEO on are indexed and ranked, yet the homepage hasn't. And everyone I've asked about this all gave the generic assumption that "it's because this is a very competitive niche". Well that doesn't help or answer my question.

Anyone else experiencing this issue and have a plausible explanation to this, other than because our industry is soooooooo competitive?

[sweetbet]

I've never experienced this problem before. You might want to double check your sitemap and robots files, or any redirection commands (if any exist) to make sure that no one has messed with them.

[thesamurai]

Duplicate content? Check your website via trial version of DeepCrawl or Sitebulb. Then with ScreamingFrog

[Casinorep]

I've never experienced this problem before. You might want to double check your sitemap and robots files, or any redirection commands (if any exist) to make sure that no one has messed with them.

I added the sitemap that was given from Yoast to my google search console, and so far it hasn't raised any error messages.

[DaftDog]

I added the sitemap that was given from Yoast to my google search console, and so far it hasn't raised any error messages.

A sitemap is a useful guide for search engines to follow, however, as @sweetbet pointed out you also need to check you robots.txt file and also your htaccess file to make sure your home page is not some being blocked or redirected elsewhere when Googlebot visits.

[sweetbet]

Is it possible that the domain in question has incurred some sort of google penalty?

[wonderpunter]

My home page ranks for it's brand name.. everything else is a page.. and it should be if you have good content and a non EMD..

[allfreechips]

Most likely a over linking penalty if you are 50+ on the homepage. even by name? like search widget123 for your domain httpx://www.widget123.com ext??

[citizen42]

This is a common thing in competitive niches indeed. We usually tend to target high competitive/more generic keywords for our homepages which makes it harder to rank and get traffic. On the flip side the inner pages may rank better for long tail keywords.

I'd recommend a couple of simple checks to make sure it's not a problem with crawling or indexing:
1. just google this: site:yourdomian.com (make sure to replace the yourdomain.com part) - if your homepage appears among the first results it means it is indexed
2. check in search console whether you have any impressions for the homepage, even a few impressions mens it is indexed
3. as mentioned already, make sure the sitemap file contains the homepage URL and if you have a robots.txt file (yourdomain.com/robots.txt), it doesn't have a rule blocking the homepage from being crawled
4. in search console "Fetch as Google" the homepage and check the fetch result if it can actually crawl the page properly, you can also enable the rendering option to see if it renders the page properly.

If all of these checks are passed and you have other pages ranked, then I'd assume there's no real problem in terms of crawling/indexing and I'd consider making some changes to homepage content/meta data/etc. to improve the rankings.

Hope this helps.

[Sherlock]

The most probable explanation is that your "SEO" was detected and you got some kind of homepage penalty. I have seen it and it was sometimes temporary, sometimes sadly not. Change the way of manipulation that you are doing.

Since the penalties/minus points are not carried away with links out (or much less), the subpages are still indexed.

[Casinorep]

When I do a search for my URL, the homepage is listed, but it just doesn't (or hasn't) ranked for its target keywords yet. So based on this, can I assume the homepage isn't penalized?

[Casinorep]

Also interestingly, I scanned the site through DeepCrawl, and it shows that the homepage is indexable with a DeepRank score of 10. However many of the internal pages are shown as non-indexable with zero DeepRank scores for having 301s and 307s, yet these same pages are already ranked by their targeted keywords, and are also shown in Google Search Console.

[Sherlock]

When I do a search for my URL, the homepage is listed, but it just doesn't (or hasn't) ranked for its target keywords yet. So based on this, can I assume the homepage isn't penalized?

Yes, you probably overdid it with the "target keyword". I recall something like that happened to me as well with emd domains even.

The homepage is somehow penalizes or sandboxed, probably just temporarily. The worst thing you can do not is adding fuel into the fire. So my advice, that for sure can be wrong, is NOT to add anything for the targeted campaign. Also look for onpage wizardry: if you did not do something like too high density of the keywords. Rather add/replace with synonyms or something like that.

[elieli88]

I've never experienced this problem before. You might want to double check your sitemap and robots files, or any redirection commands (if any exist) to make sure that no one has messed with them.

What should I look for in the robots file if I have this problem ?
And what should I change if I need to change something in the Robots file ?

[sweetbet]

What should I look for in the robots file if I have this problem ?
And what should I change if I need to change something in the Robots file ?

You just have to make sure that the robots.txt file isn't disallowing google and other search engines from indexing the content that you want them to index. https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt

[Sherlock]

If someone does not know what is robots.txt then forbidding search engines to crawl the pages almost certainly will not be an issue.

[Casinorep]

Yes, you probably overdid it with the "target keyword".

What do you mean by this? That I over optimize the page with the target keywords, as in having too much of it in the body content? Or having too many anchor inbound links with this keyword? I only optimize according to Yoast's suggestions in Wordpress, and it doesn't indicate that I over repeat the keyword.

[Sherlock]

That I over optimize the page with the target keywords, as in having too much of it in the body content? Or having too many anchor inbound links with this keyword?

Yes, (at least) one of those. I have no idea what you did, because I do not see your website and link profile even how fast you flooded your site. I also do not know the Google algo. But we are all humans so we do the same stupid things. I did the things too, I do it still, but I do not know either what exactly was the problem. Just a wild guess^2 and also the thing that you can fix most easily is to rewrite the texts (onpage SEO). But maybe completely wrong suggestion and your texts have some quality.

I have no idea what are Yoast's suggestions. But I guess it is not Google's suggestions (=create quality content for people and not for Google, care about visitors and do not do anything else; [which is as good as government suggestions: study hard, work hard for someone else, pay taxes, drive slowly, go to elections, die before pension -> yes, you will never be in a conflict with power, so you will never get punished, but you will achieve nothing and just lose your only real asset called life]). And Google's suggestions for sure is nothing like keyword targeting or building artificial linkfarms It is exactly the opposite.

I mean: there is really no authority that can tell you what SEO aka manipulation is still ok. And even if it were, you can never be sure you did not do something stupid. If you already operate with the "keyword targeting" term, you are walking on thin ice. Yoast, as some authority, probably just gives you feeling of false safety. I do not know how to put it, because it is so obvious, but probably just to me... Imagine yourself as a gambler, who is in fact completely lost what to bet on. But then appears some tipster service or roulette system. It works so well not because it is giving some valuable information. No way. Nobody knows anything. It works only because people do not know anything, they are in fact scared to bones, but they want a pat on the head: "You are doing it well, son" and they are willing to pay for that.

As our players are in fact our product, we all are a product of seo wizards. Even the biggest authorities can not be taken seriously.

tl;dr take out 50-75% of the work you did on target keywords and wait or just wait; most likely I am not helping you anyways

[wonderpunter]

Is your webiste using a EMD? is the home page your main money page? do you have other pages targeting the same keyword? like i mentioned above my home page only ranks for the domain name brand name, that''s all i need it for.. pretty much any competiative keyword will go to a internal page.. there are very few EMD's that hold top 10 spots nowadays check some keywords you will see

[Casinorep]

What is 'EMD'?