My URL is: www.mortgagebranchconnection.com Hi, I've have been looking to boost my search result rankings by directing everything to the homepage. My pages and blog posts are ranking in google but not my home page. I use wordpress and the seo yoast plugin. In the canonical link section for each page and blog post I put "mortgagebranchconnection.com". I was told if i do this it can boost my search results. Instead of having one page and one blog post taking up 2 spots, if I use the canonical link so they all go to the home page I can get a higher ranking. But for my search results it still shows the blogs or pages within my website instead of the home page. The competition level on my keywords are all .90 and above and most of my pages and blogs are already on the 3rd or 4th pages within 2 months so I know I'm doing good but could I be doing better directing it all to the homepage. My home page is filled with information from each page and post so it's still user friendly, plus I have my video on the home page to show exactly what services are being provided. Questions: 1. Is it better for me to direct the pages, blog posts, and categories all to the home page for better rankings? 2. Is there a reason the canonical link feature in seo yoast is not working? Does it take time? Is google just overriding it and putting my pages and posts instead? 3. Is the canonical link feature the right feature for what I'm talking about? I know it's mostly used for duplicate content but I read that is can also be used to group all your pages and posts to one url, which would be the home page of course. 4. I submitted a press release with my home page link to pr wire, do you think that had anything to do with blocking my home page from coming up on search results. All my pages, posts, and categories have the canonical link set to "mortgagebranchconnection.com. Please advise on how I should continue. Thank you!
Hi, As you have stated above about your SEO it seems that you are doing a great SEO for your website. As per my knowledge about using a canonical link feature for SEO, it is why being used mostly because In the past, many sites have encountered issues with multiple versions of the same content on different URLs. This creates three big problems: Search engines don't know which version(s) to include/exclude from their indices Search engines don't know whether to direct the link metrics (trust, authority, anchor text, link juice, etc.) to one page or keep it separated between multiple versions Search engines don't know which version(s) to rank for query results When this happens, site owners suffer rankings and traffic losses and engines suffer lowered relevancy. Thus, in order to fix these problems, webmasters, started applying the new Canonical URL tag. This attribute is somewhat like 301 redirect that tells the engines that multiple pages should be considered as one. So there are many other such parameters that hinder home page from coming up on search results. You can also refer this blog post link: http://www.seomark.co.uk/small-business-seo-tips/ Reading it, you will get a rough ideas and tips what other parameters you can improve. Regards, Sameer
