Inner page instead of home page now showing in Google search results

[MelH]

Hi

I have an Australian website which for the last 4 years has ranked in the top 3 places on page one of Google for our main search terms.

Around March/April we noticed (for no reason we can find) our first page position changed and our home page and an inner page were 4 and 5 on Google’s search results for our main search keywords.

Australia has 8 states and this happened in 3 of them <snip>. All other 5 states still had the home page showing but we had slumped to 4 or 5 on page one of Google's results.

Then around May our home page disappeared from those 3 states and only the inner page still showed in position 3.

We did a lot of on page optimisation for the whole site which made no difference.

Quite by accident I discovered that if I clicked the link “repeat the search with the omitted results included” which is found at the end of the search results pages, the home page reappeared beneath the inner page on page one of Google for those 3 states.

The issue is definitely not 'duplicate content' as the home page and inner page are entirely different. The problem we have is the inner page is just like a travel brochure , whereas the home page is the one the sells our services and is not state specific - we need people to land on it, not the inner page.

Our competitors, <snip>, all still have their home pages showing in all states. In fact the number one website has his home page and the inner city page 1 and 2 on page one of Google.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what could be the cause of our problem? <snip>

Thanks …. Mel

[edited by: goodroi at 1:44 am (utc) on Sep 6, 2013]
[edit reason] Welcome to WebmasterWorld, please go read & follow the forum charter :) [/edit]

[aakk9999]

This is not an unusual situation, although it seems to be a bit misterious one. We had a number of discussions on this subject in a recent year or so, so it may be worth reading these few threads:
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

But more worrying is that your home page seems to be filtered out.

What I do find strange is that you are getting different results by state. Have you looked at your visitor usage stats between states, whether they are any different?

There is another thing you *could* try, which is to change home page title slightly, to turn words around. What I mean is not to change it completely, but for example, to have change similar to changing from "best widgets1 and widgets2 in location" to "best widgets2 and widgets1 in location" or something like that.

The idea behind is that if Google does build usage signals, changing some major part of the page may reset these signals.

[Robert Charlton]

I've seen some examples of the home page on an exact match domain get completely filtered out for the home page for its main keyword. I assumed it was a case of over-optimized external anchor text (ie, too much the same anchor) pointing at that page... but had no easy way to test it at the time.

[MelH]

aakk9999
I've looked in Google analytics but it doesn't filter by state so I can't find statistics for that but traffic for the home page url is easily 80% higher than that of the inner pages.

I tried changing the title text around so hopefully that might do something so lets see.

Robert anchor test is not an issue, we have a good mix of anchor text with no bias toward any particular phrase.

[JD_Toims]

I assumed it was a case of over-optimized external anchor text (ie, too much the same anchor) pointing at that page.

^ This -- Read it carefully.

[MelH]

Yes that was what I was responding to "external anchor text" from sites linking to our website.