Internal pages are not ranking

Keywords supposed to rank for internal pages are ranking for home page

[Sachit]

Hello Everyone,

My client’s domain age is around 13 years. The guy who was previously working on this website, created tons of links pointing to home page. Keywords he used for linking are not relevant to home page, these keywords are for internal pages. I have submitted all such external links to google’s disavow tool. But internal pages are still not ranking for its corresponding pages

Any help/suggestion would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[fathom]

Absolutely impossible to advise without specifics.

Might be worth paying for a pro-membership where you can provide more details.

If not ... what is a ton?

Does the homepage rank?

Did the homepage lose ranks for any of the targeted phrases?

Clearly the homepage had ranks and lost ranks due to the link anchors as disavowing does nothing other than reverse unnatural links. (More specifically turns unnatural dofollow links into nofollow links)

If you are suggesting the domain was devalued by PENGUIN no recovery of ranks are possible without a data refresh and Google has suggested that could be in the future... when... "UNKNOWN!"

[martinibuster]

If the home page is ranking then probably those links are ok. The only time to disavow the links is if you visually inspect them and find that they are spammy. Otherwise it's probably not advisable to disavow because you're only ruining your site's ability to rank.

A specific situation
If the site's ranking and the links are fine, then the issue is not that you have too many home page links. The issue is that you don't have enough inner page links. In which case disavowing home page links may not be the best course of action because it does not solve your problem: not enough links to the inner page. In this situation (and only this situation as described), the solution is more inner page links, not less home page links.

It's not an altogether bad situation to be in. It's an opportunity to possibly rank two pages in the SERPs, the inner page and the home page, or to gain an enhanced SERP listing.