Member Avatar for samuelmax

Please do share your experiences regarding the inner page & home page SEO.

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Brief, practical guide (building on ’s question and the points from , and ) to decide when to treat the homepage differently from inner pages, and what to do next.

Think in terms of intent. Brand or navigational queries are often best served by the homepage (or a branded landing page), while informational and transactional queries usually want a specific inner page that answers the user’s need. Use link and content strategies to match that intent rather than treating the site as a single SEO unit. (developers.google.com)

A short, practical workflow:

  • Map your pages by intent (brand, category, informational, product/transactional).
  • Pick the pages you want to rank for each intent and optimize titles, H1s, meta and on-page content around that intent.
  • Build contextually relevant backlinks to the page that best matches the referring content (deep links where appropriate), and support them with logical internal links so crawlers and users can find the page easily. This distribution often outperforms sending every link to the homepage. (searchenginejournal.com)

Technical checklist / quick troubleshooting:

  • Use Search Console’s URL Inspection and Coverage reports to verify indexing, canonical selection, and crawl errors.
  • Submit/validate XML sitemaps and ensure important pages are included.
  • Confirm canonical tags are consistent, avoid conflicting signals, and check mobile-first and Core Web Vitals (page experience matters to how Google evaluates pages). (developers.google.com)

Cautions and priorities: diversify anchor text and link targets, avoid large-scale or paid link schemes that try to manipulate rankings (Google actively combats link spam), and keep the homepage usable for brand queries while letting deep content carry topical authority. Measure outcomes (GSC + analytics) and adjust the ratio of homepage vs inner-page focus based on which pages actually convert and rank. (developers.google.com)

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Member Avatar for Dani

From an SEO perspective, IMHO it's much better to have "deep links", which are backlinks to inner pages, as opposed to links to your homepage or other landing pages.

Google likes to send people doing searches directly to an end-page that has the exact content they're looking for. They don't want to send people to navigational pages where the user then has to click around to find what they're looking for. Deep pages tend to be the ones with the actual quality content, while homepages tend to be just "cover sheets" and navigational tools for those pages.

Therefore, because Google finds inner pages are typically more relevant for the searcher, it makes sense that those are the pages you want to push the most number of backlinks to, because a tiny bit of PageRank is lost with each hop from page to page through your site that Googlebot does.

Member Avatar for getmused

I agree with Dani, very well described. You should more of deep links building to gain higher page rank.

Member Avatar for audrey110

this for regular SEO From an SEO perspective, but if you going for brand optimization that home page would be your prefer landing page.

Member Avatar for Dani

Audrey, this question was posted in the SEO forum which is why I addressed it strictly from an SEO perspective.

There's lots that can be done for branding ... Not just links to the homepage, but even just mentions of the company name, logo, a distinctive color scheme, etc. throughout the web all contributes to overall brand recognition.

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