When we talk about terms like
“ranking,”
“Page 1”,
“SERPs” (Search Engine Results page),
we have to understand a very important concept. Websites – as an entity – don’t rank, only pages, or individual URL’s do.
Search engines are huge databases containing billions of ‘records’. Each ‘record’ is a web page. A search is a ‘query’ of the database that returns the ‘records’ or pages that qualify as an answer to that query.
In many cases, it is the homepage that shows up as the ‘answer’ for a search, but that is simply the home page itself that is ranking, not the overall site.
This does not mean that pages are evaluated independently of the whole site, but that what ends up being ranked is the page, not the site.
Phoenix Education 