is a site rooted at domain important?

[m2gg9]

Hi Guys,

I posted previously at 'Search Engine Promotion' with details on my situation (no response though).

In summarized form... Most highly ranked sites are site index pages (ex. www.widget.com, www.bluewidget.com, etc). Seldomly (I cant even think of an example), do I see high rankings for sites on child pages (ex. www.widget.com/sales/, www.bluwidget.com/products/blue_widget.html). What is the reason for this? Is it simply because people promote the former case and not the latter? Or is it because Google gives some priority weighting to the former case?

Thanks
-Mark

[WebMistress]

I can give some input on this as I host another site as a subdomain. I would guess the reason most don't rank as high is because all the inbound links point to the homepage, and not that page. That subpage is only getting some transferred PR from the sites own internal pages, which ends up giving the subpage a generally lower PR than in higher positions in SERP's. I, however, get inbound links to my subpage, so it gets PR from my site and from other sites. Therefore, it ranks well.

[Alphawolf]

Well, I think you just need to do more broad searches. :)

For example a search on "length of the great wall of china" does not rank index pages the highest.

Many people saw index pages getting dumped in favor of other pages for rankings during 1st phase of the "update".

Generally, most links will point to the domain and therefore the domain will have the highest PR.

Doesn't mean that is the deciding factor in a search, but sometimes it may be.

Regards,

AW

[chamade]

Most highly ranked sites are site index pages

Tend to disagree on this.

On our main site we sell things for clients and have found in many instances that when you search on their name + area as keywords that our child pages www.area.com/theirname comes up higher in the serps than www.theirname.com

Of course that leaves them miffed because we sell more of their product for them then they do....