Competition within a site, among homepage and subpage

[deeper]

Hi,
I know it is better to avoid two subpages both about "blue widgets" even if it is no duplicate content.

What about the same situation with the homepage as one of the two pages?
Less a possible problem?

It's not always easy to avoid an internal "topic competition" among homepage and a subpage. The homepage uses generic terms, comprehending all specific topics of the subpages. So there are always some overlappings. Furthermore you want to offer more content to generic terms as the homepage enables.

[aakk9999]

This is in fact a fairly common issue and we had a number of threads on this over past few years.

Some time ago Tedster suggested it could be because of internal anchors that may help the page they are on (rather than page the link points to [webmasterworld.com...] )

External links may also have the influence of home page ranking above internal page. Sometimes this is a problem if internal page is a better page for the visitor to land to, in other cases it may not be a problem as the home page may be a good choice anyway.

There were also cases where Google kept swapping home page with internal page in SERPs and the ranking fluctuated as each of these pages would rank in different position in SERPs.

[deeper]

Do I understand you right?

Linking with "blue widgets" from homepage to a subpage helps ranking the homepage with blue widgets more than the linked subpage? Doesn't sound reasonable.

[aakk9999]

I cannot really quantify the word "more". But from my experience it also helps the page on which the link is placed. Since home page would usually be a stronger page, in some cases it may make home page rank instead. Of course, this is a simplified version - there are other signals and it also depends on what the other content on each page is.

[JD_Toims]

I cannot really quantify the word "more". But from my experience it also helps the page on which the link is placed.

I've seen this too.

Another thing I've seen is when a page appears "over-optimized" for a phrase the "next best page" for the phrase from the same site may [not always, but occasionally] replace it in the rankings.

[deeper]

@aakk9999:
Interesting. I know this effect as a point of discussion regarding to EXTERNAL links. But within a site... and as the purpose of the anchor is to tell about the LINKED page....

As you say it may be dependant from certain factors, because every homepage links to a lot of subpages via the navi, but will not rank better than all pages.

JD_Toims:
Indeed this may be one of these factors. One that really would make sense.

Another could be the status of the linking page as hub.

[member22]

<moved from another location>

There is one thing i don't understand about my website versus my competitors website. Let's image mywebsite sells green shoes. I have 2 web address myhomepage.com and myhomepage.com/greenshoes and guess what myhomepage.com ranks from greenshoes but myhomepage.com/greenshoes is nowhere to to be found, why is that ?

Thank you,

[edited by: aakk9999 at 3:29 pm (utc) on Oct 1, 2013]