Are Internal Pages Harder To Rank?

[austtr]

Google indexes and ranks individual pages so it's possible to SEO individual pages within the site.

But a major part of rankings success lies in the votes (links) that other 3rd party sites give you and by far the majority of those IBL's will be to your home page URL. Sure you can ask for the link to be diverted to your internal money pages but that is a robbing Peter to pay Paul scenario.

An internal page is typically about one subject and is part of a broader site. eg... the Xanadu car hire page could be just one of the 300 pages that make up the Xanadu vacation guide.

Despite some very focused SEO on my part for that (fictional) Xanadu car hire page, it is always outranked by the home pages of sites where the whole site is specifically about Xanadu car hire.

Do internal pages face an uphill battle to get top rankings in competitive niches?

[aristotle]

Despite some very focused SEO on my part for that (fictional) Xanadu car hire page, it is always outranked by the home pages of sites where the whole site is specifically about Xanadu car hire.

Well, you are obviously at a big disadvantage if your one page is competing against other peoples' entire sites. You would probably need to get a very powerful overall site to win out. Wikipedia does it successfully, but it's an exception to the rule.

[piatkow]

In part it comes down to identifying what you are targetting.

Local business normally ranks for town + widget. If you go for sub-region or region + widget you may find a niche.

[brianbestwishall]

Yeah, internal pages face an uphill battle to get top rankings in competitive niches, but if you can do seo well, increase enough inlinks to your relevant internal pages, they also can get high pagerank and get the chance to be listed on the first page using google search engineer

[i rahulgupta]

yeah, because internal pages need to indexed and get mote backlink to improve pagerank so if you do more SEO then u may improve rank for it.

[htdawg]

I have the same problem, trying to outrank domains with single internal pages on a large site, some pages do well, some do not, most of the time the domains show up in the top 10 results and with good cause, if you look at it from google's point of view for relevancy.