SEOBook: Google Ranking Internal Pages Rather Than Home Pages

[JamesR]

If this sticks, could have massive implications:

http://www.seobook.com/google-ranking-internal-pages-rather-home-pages

I had a sense a few months back we were on the verge of some massive signal changes, things seemed very "stale".  I don't think I remember a time when there have been so many rapid changes in such a short period of time, a bit shocked by the barrage.  Possibly timed to steal press from Bing/Yahoo?

[TallTroll]

The "internal pages ranking" effect could be just due to rebalancing the weight given to deep vs home page links, rather than a deliberate attempt by G to use deep pages in the SERPs. From a strict IR viewpoint, it's probably a good idea anyway, since pointing to specific content is likely a stronger "vote" than just pointing to a site

[Rumbas]

We have at least one site where a couple of subpages holds a higher PR that the index page. Not that they are ranking better per se, but a higher toolbar PR.

[TallTroll]

>> but a higher toolbar PR.

Does that server that delivered live PR still work? If so, have you checked the PR on there? Live data has got to better than TBPR, at least

[JamesR]

low PR pages outrank high ones all the time

The "internal pages ranking" effect could be just due to rebalancing the weight given to deep vs home page links, rather than a deliberate attempt by G to use deep pages in the SERPs.

But if you look at Aaron's example of the SEO serp, you'll see that it is indeed a deliberate switch

From a strict IR viewpoint, it's probably a good idea anyway, since pointing to specific content is likely a stronger "vote" than just pointing to a site

In some cases I definitely agree but for a single term like "seo", ranking a blog post from SEOMoz in the top 10 is definitely an outlier

[TallTroll]

>> But if you look at Aaron's example of the SEO serp, you'll see that it is indeed a deliberate switch

If ever there's a term that gets its' results monkeyed with, it's "seo". You've got to wonder if they're tempted to just put bizarre stuff up by hand, and watch the forums go nuts trying to work out what's going on...

Check the #10 for "seo * *". Yup, that same seoMOZ page (or it is for me, once I'd forced the .com index). It's got the juice for some reason. Since it's 2 years old, it's links are nicely aged, and I bet a load of them are using "seo cheat sheet" as the anchor text. By comparison, a lot of the links to the seoMOZ home page are going to say "seomoz", "rands place", and "click here".

So, if you're going to pick one page from that site thats relevent for "seo", maybe the home page isn't it, maybe it's that 2 year old one that has the term in every damn link. Since it's also showing up for seo and a double wildcard, I could believe that its ranking on it's own merits, not as a subpage of seomoz.org, plucked from obscurity by Google.

If that is the case (and I agree, it's still a very big if), a rebalancing of link juice to favour deep links would naturally produce this kind of effect, causing focussed content, with focussed links, to outrank smeary home pages.