How to handle "2" homepages?
-
Came across an interesting problem. A site has the traditional homepage of site.com and ranks okay.
Later I found that another "homepage", site.com/home.html that ranks well for several terms but actually has old branding and semi-up-to-date content.
Site.com/home.html has a solid linking profile but not as strong as the current homepage (site.com).
The question I have is should I try to salvage the page or 301 redirect to site.com?
Thank for the help!
-
First...... before you do anything...
Run analytics on both versions of the homepage to see how much traffic they are bringing in, where it is coming from and if it is converting.
Only then are you in a position to decide what to do.
If one page has very different traffic than the other you might lose more by redirecting than improving the page and running it separately.
-
I would 301 the /home.html version to site.com. This will consolidate all of the link juice and create one stronger page. Figure out what terms the /home.html page is ranking for, and consider adding some keywords and content to your site.com homepage if they are still relevant and useful to your current site.
-
Either way i would redirect one of them. You could also use canonical urls to send juice back to the first page if the content is slightly different and still viable. Either way will work.
-
I'd expect you'll find, if you look closer at the inbound links site.com/home has, they'll explain why it's ranking for those terms.
And, in such a case, I'd expect you'll generate similar rankings with site.com once the 301 carries - which is what I'd recommend doing.
Unless (there's always an "unless") there's another page on the site relevant to what site.com/home is ranking for (or you could build one) - in which case, you can use that 301 to send that link juice to that deeper page. Never a bad thing to build deep links, but I'd want to be sure the topic is a match. (Again, I'd take a look at those links and their anchor text.)
Without knowing the specifics I'd say 9 out of 10 times you want to achieve a canonical home page URL and consolidate link juice by redirecting all alternative home page URLs to site.com via 301.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My "search visibility" went from 3% to 0% and I don't know why.
My search visibility on here went from 3.5% to 3.7% to 0% to 0.03% and now 0.05% in a matter of 1 month and I do not know why. I make changes every week to see if I can get higher on google results. I do well with one website which is for a medical office that has been open for years. This new one where the office has only been open a few months I am having trouble. We aren't getting calls like I am hoping we would. In fact the only one we did receive I believe is because we were closest to him in proximity on google maps. I am also having some trouble with the "Links" aspect of SEO. Everywhere I see to get linked it seems you have to pay. We are a medical office we aren't selling products so not many Blogs would want to talk about us. Any help that could assist me with getting a higher rank on google would be greatly appreciated. Also any help with getting the search visibility up would be great as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benjaminleemd1 -
Should pages with rel="canonical" be put in a sitemap?
I am working on an ecommerce site and I am going to add different views to the category pages. The views will all have different urls so I would like to add the rel="canonical" tag to them. Should I still add these pages to the sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
New site, new URL, lots of custom content. Load it all or "trickle" it over time?
New site, new URL, lots of custom content. Load it all or "trickle" it over time? Would it make a difference in terms of ranking the site? Interested in your thoughts. Thanks! BBuck!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
Use "If-Modified-Since HTTP header"
I´m working on a online brazilian marketplace ( looks like etsy in US) and we have a huge amount of pages... I´ve been studing a lot about that and I was wondering to use If-Modified-Since so Googlebot could check if the pages have been updated, and if it is not, there is no reason to get a new copy of them since it already has a current copy in the index. It uses a 304 status code, "and If a search engine crawler sees a web page status code of 304 it knows that web page has not been updated and does not need to be accessed again." Someone quoted before me**Since Google spiders billions of pages, there is no real need to use their resources or mine to look at a webpage that has not changed. For very large websites, the crawling process of search engine spiders can consume lots of bandwidth and result in extra cost and Googlebot could spend more time in pages actually changed or new stuff!**However, I´ve checked Amazon, Rakuten, Etsy and few others competitors and no one use it! I´d love to know what you folks think about it 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoMartin10 -
Do I need to use rel="canonical" on pages with no external links?
I know having rel="canonical" for each page on my website is not a bad practice... but how necessary is it for pages that don't have any external links pointing to them? I have my own opinions on this, to be fair - but I'd love to get a consensus before I start trying to customize which URLs have/don't have it included. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netrepid0 -
Google SERPs do not display "cached"
When I am signed in with Google and searching sites, the snippets do not display the "cached" link. Not good since I am trying to see when a particular page was crawled. If I login to another server that I never use to browse and search from there the "cache" link does show up. Assumption: google knows who I am on my machine and is "helping" me.......but is there an easy way to turn this help off?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eyauuk0 -
Get-targeted homepage for users vs crawlers
Hello there! This is my first post here on SEOmoz. I'll get right into it then... My website is housingblock.com, and the homepage runs entirely off of geo-targeting the user's IP address to display the most relevant results immediately to them. Can potentially save them a search or three. That works great. However, when crawlers frequent the site, they are obviously being geo-targeted for their IP address, too. Google has come to the site via several different IP addresses, resulting in several different locations being displayed for it on the homepage (Mountain View, CA or Clearwater, MI are a couple). Now, this poses an issue because I'm worried that crawlers will not be able to properly index the homepage because the location, and ultimately all the content, keeps changing. And/or, we will be indexed for a specific location when we are in fact a national website (I do not want to have my homepage indexed/ranked under Mountain View, CA, or even worse, Clearwater, MI [no offence to any Clearwaterians out there]). Of course, my initial instinct is to create a separate landing page for the crawlers, but for obvious reasons, I am not going to do that (I did at one point, but quickly reverted back because I figured that was definitely not the route to go, long-term). Any ideas on the best way to approach this, while maintaining the geo-targeted approach for my users? I mean, isn't that what we're supposed to do? Give our users the most relevant content in the least amount of time? Seems that in doing so, I am improperly ranking my website in the eyes of the search engines. Thanks everybody! Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | THB0 -
Question about "launching to G" a new site with 500000 pages
Hey experts, how you doing? Hope everything is ok! I'm about to launch a new website, the code is almost done. Totally fresh new domain. The site will have like 500000 pages, fully internal optimized of course. I got my taticts to make G "travel" over my site to get things indexed. The problem is: to release it in "giant mode" or release it "thin" and increase the pages over the time? What do you recomend? Release the big G at once and let them find the 500k pages (do they think this can be a SPAM or something like that)? Or release like 1k/2k per day? Anybody know any good aproach to improve my chances of success here? Any word will be apreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | azaiats20
