Logic dictates that a website’s homepage should have the highest ranking among all its contents. Indeed, this is what happens most of the time, but there are cases wherein a deeper page may rank higher. This is exactly what a webmaster from Germany observed while searching for some companies on Google: FAQ pages listed on top of homepages. Why does this occur? How can people prevent this from happening with their sites?

Matt Cutts suspects that it all boils down to the number of incoming links. If visitors find underlying content really useful, then they will probably link to it directly instead of pointing to the root page. Matt illustrates this phenomenon with his personal site (mattcutts.com) and weblog (mattcutts.com/blog). His main page contains very little information and most people are more interested in reading his blog. Therefore, the latter gets a larger number of reputable links. His homepage has a PageRank of 5 while his blog has a PageRank of 7.

Webmasters may try to minimize the imbalance by having their highest-ranking pages point to the main page in order to boost its authority. However, this is usually unnecessary as Google’s preference will always be to return the homepage within search results.

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Why would an FAQ page rank above a site’s homepage? –