Well, after about a year and lots of work, I finally got a page rank of 1
Now when I do a search using a key phrase that I put in my title, I come up on page 2 of the search.

Not bad! Only problem is that when I click on my link, my "terms of use" page comes up instead of my start or "home" page. Not so good!

Can someone tell me why? I had a TOS link in my footer section (which I removed now). Could that have been the reason? Is there a way to assure that the start page comes up?

Thanks

What are the key phrase that you apply and your domain name as well? Would like to check it.

Get backlinks to the start page and not to the TOS page. Also block the TOS page through robots.txt file. This will slowly remove the TOS page from the results.

I'm guessing the keywords you searched for are also on your TOS page and search engines are considering your TOS page more relevant for the keywords.

It may also be like shabbirbhimani said and you have more links pointing to your TOS page instead of your home page.

This is actually a good learning experience. Compare the two pages and see if you can understand why a search engine would think your TOS page is more relevant. If you spend a little time trying to figure it our you'll gain some valuable seo knowledge.

Originally Posted by vangogh

It may also be like shabbirbhimani said and you have more links pointing to your TOS page instead of your home page.

Dont forget that internal links also do count.

Absolutely. An internal link is still external to the specific page being linked to.

inbound links for that page "home" + "relevant content" for your keywords, also consider to use anchor may help..

Originally Posted by Claud

What are the key phrase that you apply and your domain name as well? Would like to check it.

The keywords are "Gratis Kontaktanzeigen". It's in German. The website is www.themeetingpoint.ch . It's a dating site for Switzerland.

All my backlinks go to my start page. I think the problem was with the internal links. Since my TOS was in my footer and shows up on every page or profile, that's a lot of links for the TOS. I removed it now. Let's see what happens.

Thanks everyone for the replies and suggestions. I think I’ll be able to get it straightened out soon.

One other thing took me by surprise. I use www.domain-pop.com to check my backlinks. On my international site, www.themeetingpoint.eu I show 921 backlinks with 500 domains. My Switzerland site, www.themeetingpoint.ch I show 61 backlinks with 17 domains.

Why would I get a page rank of 1 on both of these websites? I would expect my EU site to have a higher page rank. Could it be that Google has a time limit for upgrading the page rank, say one rank position a year or something like that?

Google updates the toolbar PR about every three months or so and they don't automatically limit you to going up a certain amount.

Your PR is based on the PR of the pages linking to your page. So one PR9 page linking to you will cause your PR to go up a lot more than if several hundred (probably several thousand) PR1 pages linked to your page.

It's not just about the quantity of links.

Well it could be that the indexed page is your TOS. Yeah, you should get backlinks to your front page.

if you have lost any of your backlink , you can relax . everythink will ok again but if you have lost backlink , you start to worry