Home page PR lower than content pages!

[zak]

Hi,

Not seen this before: The PR on the homepage of one of our sites is lower than the PR on subsequent pages. Can anyone shed some light?

And any other SEO tips to improve the rank of this site would be greatly appreciated.

Site: www.arlingtonhotelgroup.co.uk

I don't know if its OK to put domains on here - if requested, will happily take down - don't want to be accused of gaining links!

Thanks all.

[Marcia]

zak, sometimes that can be because of an IBL to an interior page, but a lot of people are reporting now that they're seeing the same thing happening to their sites with no evidence of links other than to the homepage that would cause that.

Doing a Google link: search (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aarlingtonhotelgroup.co.uk&btnG=Google+Search) for the domain - for starters, see the first two pages shown - with a dup as default.aspx

I can't tell you how to do it with an aspx site, but it looks like URL rewriting is in order. There is an IIS equivalent for mod_rewrite. Another thing that I've heard about IIS sites is to use all absolute addressing throughout the site. The homepage should be linked to without the .aspx file extension or a page name included.

Then, see all these pages - apparently data driven (and Supplemental) - that just redirect back to the homepage, and some that really have virtually nothing on them.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:arlingtonhotelgroup.co.uk&num=20&hl=en&lr=&start=80&sa=N&filter=0

See what the text-only cache looks like on this one, while with regular cache or the page itself, the browser is redirected:

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:fCZ3EWmFDg0J:www.arlingtonhotelgrou p.co.uk/fullArticle.aspx%3FnewsId%3D43+site:arlingtonhotel group.co.uk&hl=en&lr=&strip=1

It looks like some back end issues really need to be addressed, in addition to the usual SEO part of it - including optimization of the internal navigation, but along with a tech solution being implemented.

Hopefully someone will come along who's more technically capable, particularly with IIS, who can tell you more.

[zak]

Thanks. I think! My brain has just exploded. Got a bit of research to do... this site is doing pretty well with ranks, and I believe the basic SEO is sound. You highlight what I suspected, that there were backend issues and pointing to the homepage.

I agree with you - hopefully someone more techincally gifted will come along and help me with these issues... I am but a humble designer!

Many thanks.

[Marcia]

BTW, welcome to SEW Forums! :)

OK, there are 4 hotels so it's not a big issue size-wise, but see this page is PR3, but if you backtrack and take the index.aspx out of the URL the root of that directory shows, without PR

http://www.arlingtonhotelgroup.co.uk/wroxham/index.aspx

But it isn't cached

http://72.14.203.104/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-11,GGLD:en&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.arlingtonhotelgroup.co.uk %2Fwroxham%2F

I know that's no help, I was just digging around a little more. And you may be just a humble designer, but it's a beautiful site - nice job there!

[zak]

Thanks for the kind words...

...this is all a bit beyond me, but nothing that can't be learned. Generally though, would you say the SEO is sound?

Thanks

[zak]

And am I right in thinking that what you are saying is I need to make sure that all varients of the domain point to the same place? And apply this for all pages?

Thanks again.

And yes, its early days at this forum, but loving SEO and loving how helpful people are here. All good.

[webkidsan]

All this defintly make sense ...however it doesnot answer the initial question that why does internal pages have higher rank than the home page ... the only reason I am saying this is that I am seeing exactly the same thing n our site and my site as far as I knoe has any of those issues discussed in the earlier replies ...