Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
For example, if an entire domain is banned in Google, that would certainly factor into whether or not a specific page from that domain would rank high on Google.
On the other hand, I have had individual pages from a few of my domains rank higher than the homepage of the domain itself. This is obviously due to the qualities of the individual page itself.
Surely Google looks at the inbound links to a page. It goes without saying that they also inspect the content of the page. But the question we are trying to answer is this: Would a specific page from a domain that is ranking high on Google still rank high if that page was the only page in the entire website?
I realize that if you have a domain with 3,000 pages all linking to a specific page on the domain, that page would lose 3,000 links if it was the only page in the website. But what if those 3,000 links were coming from another comparable website? Would this give the page a similar ranking on Google?
The reason this debate came up is because we found a page from a one-page website that was outranking us on Google under a very popular search phrase. This page only showed 20 inbound links, but was full of content. However, there were no other pages on the website.
Anyway, I figured someone here could help me silence this debate in our office. Thanks!
Glad to hear that the Google algo can still spot and rank a relevant one-pager pretty much just from its content and a handful of relevant backlinks.
What convinces me of that is the sheer volume of "thin" pages that rank well from sites like Amazon or Ebay or some big price comparison sites. Seeing pages ranking high that have no intrinsic value on their own would seem to indicate that something beyond the individual pages is giving them the boost.
Ultimately PageRank is assigned to documents, however, even if Google does not have actual domain based PageRank factors, on-domain content and internal linking structure can affect the PageRank or the SERP strength of specific documents (something that good SEOs use to their advantage). Hypothetically, if you were to express this mathematically you might isolate those on-domain influences to represent domain wide influence.
Factors in the ranking can be page, domain, logical site, or webgraph grouping dependent.
I have another page for which I devoted a lot of time cultivating inbound links. It has a PR of 3.
The rest of my pages are PR2.
A few years ago, the homepage had a higher value, if you may, in the search results because it was the "door" to the rest of a good site and so was returned pretty highly for specific queries in the SERPS. Then they changed that - poof! Think it's something to do with content on the homepage and it not serving simply as a directory to the rest of a site.
Focus on all your pages individually and your domain as a whole will benefit.
