Makes no sense - about page ranking higher than index page!

For one of my sites the terms and conditions/about page is ranking higher than the home/index page!!

This is the first time that the about page is showing up in the
Google serps

The terms and conditions/about page is un-optimised and is full of boring legal stuff - how can this page rank higher than
the optimised home page - makes no sense?!

Any thoughts anyone :-?

Stuart
Internet Trading UK

I have a similar problem. My links page shows up before my real content page. Really wierd.

IT.... That's because you have a lot of inbound links to that page... from your own site.

bbb... your linking partners must be linking to your "links page' instead of your homepage

Thanks for that Egol and bbb.

I have just checked and there are 6 inbound links to the about page, compared with 7 links to the index page, so I do not think it can be tha number of inbound links causing this.

I think other factors are at play here - but I haven't worked out what they are.

Both pages have remained unchanged for at least 3-4 months.

Stuart
Internet Trading UK

For what search term is this the case? What do the links that point to each page have for link text back to each of the pages? What is the PR of each site linking to each page?, etc....

Cheers

I have had this all the time - but it is due to the fact that I am trying to "spread" the home page over too many subjects [but that is tha nature of our sites] so I concentrate on side door entry and especially odd pages like your terms pages but more.... little pages that are in frames!!!!

Treat them as an individual home page put a little java in them and when found they explode into the frame - which could be a frame copy of you home page. Link the pages from the noframe bit with a link back from those pages.

Thanks The Bear,

The search term is: patio heaters uk,

When searching in google.com in the uk the about page is #10 and the index page is #16.

The pr of all my internal page links are mainly PR4, with several pages pr3.

The text links are:

home page: pr4
terms and conditions:pr4
frequently asked questions:pr4
patio heaters:pr4
barbecues:pr4
sitemap:pr4
links: no pr yet, page just added in last week.

Thanks for taking an interest

:grin:

Stuart
Internet Trading UK

Stuart,

About that site of yours ...

You have no reference to your home page in the nav bar or from what I can see on any other page, thus any side door entries don't pass any PR back to the homepage. Therefor the inside pages appear ahead of the home page even when doing a search for your home page as text via Google.

Cheers,
theBear

the number of inbound links is not the critical thing... it is the PR of the pages that link to you... one inbound from a PR7 is worth a boat load of links from PR1s and PR2s

A very very true statement EGOL. However his site looks basicly like this to Google

hp > 1p > 2p > 1p
      1p > 3p > 1p
      1p > 4p > 1p

Oh and btw there is a difference between http://....../ and http://...../index.html so make sure you call things by the same name throughout your site and be particularly careful about links to your home page.

Cheers,
theBear

It could be a case of "the vanishing index page". This has been a common problem during the last update.

In many cases it seems to be a duplicate content problem caused by incorrect linking to the domain home page. Usually this is the index page, so it's the one that suffers.

In my case, recently, my index was kicked down in the serps because of 3 directories that were linking to my site with the URL www.mydomain.org/?theirdomain.com

In effect, this caused Google to see 4 versions of my index page and thus watered down the PR on all of them, including the real one.

The removal of those 3 incoming links, done with some threatening about copyright, caused the index page to pop back up at #1 in the recent 64.68 crawls.

Google used to be more understanding about what the true domain name of a site is. It seems to have stumbled in this during the recent changes.

This doesn't explain all instances of missing index pages, but it is something that you might check.
You can look for duplicates by searching the kw's of your index title, then adding &filter=0 to the end of the query string in the address bar. This can reveal the copies.

Stefan - wow good info but can you clarify a bit? "In my case, recently, my index was kicked down in the serps because of 3 directories that were linking to my site with the URL www.mydomain.org/?theirdomain.com" That's strange - why would someone have the link that way?