Sub-page Ranks Best for Domain Search

[wesmaster]

When you search G (and Bing, but not Yahoo) for the domain name (without extension) of one of our websites a sub-page on the domain comes up instead of the home page (the root). Of the 8+ websites we've released this has only happened for this one website. It's been this way for over a year, but I don't recall if it's always been this way. Anyone else had this problem before? The only way to get the root domain to show up for the website name is to search exactly for "example.com". We'd much rather have the root show up than the "sign up" page, which is essentially what is showing when you search for the domain/website name.

[gn_wendy]

you probably have a lot of links to you signup page with the anchor for your domain/website

best solution would be to build links to your main website page.

[tangor]

Whatever is on that page ranks. Use that to link back to your home page, or to other pages on your site. Don't ask too many questions, just make it work for the rest of the site.

[wesmaster]

Zero links on the internet to the sign up page. And zero SEO on the sign up page for the website name / domain name. The website name is used more on the home page than on the signup page (since it's only used in the header/footer of that page). There is no logical reason, which is why I'm posting this, hoping for some creative ideas.

The only thing I can come up with is that, if you consider the header as well, the home page has 3 links to the sign up page. But that would only make it the 2nd most important page, IMO. Thoughts?

[Robert Charlton]

...the home page has 3 links to the sign up page.

That's a big clue. ;)

Do you want the sign-up page to rank at all? If not, put a robots meta tag on the page with this syntax...

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">

This will at least allow the page to accumulate PageRank and pass it on to other pages. Then, as tangor suggests, link to other pages on your site.

The alternative, of using rel="nofollow" on your links from home to the signup page, is more wasteful of PageRank, as the PR from those links would disappear into a black hole and not get recirculated through the site.

[helpnow]

Is it possible that your home page is duplicated, possibly through multiple URLs pointing to your home page? If so, enough of these would be enough to filter your home page right out of the SERPs, and another inner top level page was shown instead on a domainname search. This exact scenario happened to us. Fix the dupes, homepage came back. Theoretically, the strength of the domainname by itself in the URL should be enough to make your home page rank #1, so, if it doesn't, I would be assuming I have a problem of some sort, and not simply that an inner page is outranking it. Doesn't make sense. I've never seen a site with no problems have an inner page outrank the home page for a domainname search.