Our "home page" is behind a member wall, options?

[Kenn_Gold]

So www.pch.com(portal) redirects to www.pch.com/unrecognized(landing page) if you are not registered with us and logged in.  This means that the search engines are not logged in, so they see only our landing page.

It used to be that there was no portal/home, on pch.com, that was just the landing page, but that changed about 6 months ago.  We do rank for our brand terms, but my company would like to rank for terms like "sweepstakes." They DO understand why we don't, thankfully. They don't think SEO is magic voodoo. They get it. But they asked for options, as I have said that the portal on www.pch.com really is a good page to optimize for non-brand, core terms like sweepstakes....but only if the search engines can see it.

I gave them these options, and they asked me to seek out more. So any thoughts would be good:

1. Best case scenario would be to abandon the landing page, just have the keyword rich portal page be the actual home page with no re-direct. (this won't happen, but I decided it needed to be first on my list).

2. Turn the portal into the home page (remove the redirect), but have the landing page overlay in a light box. This should, if I am not mistaken, be a best of both worlds situation, where the light box landing page would still have all of the value of the actual keyword rich portal page behind it.

3. If the landing page has to remain as it does now with the non-logged in redirect to it, change the URLs so that the landing page is www.pch.com and the portal becomes www.pch.com/members/ or something like that.

Any other thoughts? Thanks!

Kenn Gold

Publishers Clearing House

[Kenn_Gold]

And in this case, "can't" is not only dev code, but marketing code also. They are so afraid of change here...but I get that, we are successful too.

And just my saying "hey, we have the worst case scenario for SEO right now" is not always enough...they want more opinions. Which is why this Q&A feature of SEOMoz is awesome! Thanks again for your thoughtful responses.

[Dr-Pete]

Well, it's hard to refute your data with my total lack of data Have you tried any kind of hybrid approach - make it image-rich but use CSS-styled text and avoid the fully boxed/bannered approach? I'm just thinking that might not only make the button stand out even more, but it would make the text crawlable. Could be a dual win.

Unfortunately, when it comes to things like dynamic content, "can't" is often dev-code for "won't". I've been on that side of the fence, so I don't want to speak ill, but it's frustrating. I do think you're #3 is at least a good start, and should be relatively straightforward. I definitely share your concerns about the current setup.

[Kenn_Gold]

Yes, it IS a giant ad   The CTR for that "Begin" button is so incredibly high though, that it would shock you. I have been doing landing page optimization for conversion for years, and I am surprised at how high the CTR is for that.

I am not actually sure why we are not serving the home up dynamically, I have suggested it, along with some of the other suggestions I posted above. Most likely it is related to our very complicated proprietary CMS (actually two of them).

Thanks for the response!

[Dr-Pete]

I do not like that 303-redirect setup. It looks like Google is indexing pch.com, but the cache is empty, and title/snippet match the non-redirected page. This could look like an odd form of cloaking, and landing on "/urecognized" seems like a recipe for trouble (it's a really bad URL from a UX perspective, too - it sounds like an error page).

I'd also argue that the page for new visitors looks like a giant ad. It needs some explanatory content. Yes, many people know who you are, but we don't know what the site does or why we should care. What's "obvious" internally is completely opaque to the average visitor. Richer content on this page would serve both SEO and conversion.

Could you serve up the home-page dynamically - display member content if they're logged in but generic content if they're not, and avoid the redirect entirely? That's not quite like your (1) or (2), and I think it's safer than (2). If not, then (3) would be preferable, worst-case. Once a member is logged in and knows the site, a redirect is no problem.

[Kenn_Gold]

Of course it is not a 301 redirect, it is not a perm redirect as it is a conditional redirect only, based on your status of being logged in or not.

I do see that I switched back and forth between our internal language for these pages and will try to clarify.

[Chris.Menke]

Please clarify what url you're talking about when you say "landing page" and what url you're talking about when you say "portal"? Also, I think your question would be easier to understand if you used "home page" to mean the index page--but I'm not sure that's what you're doing.

Also,  your redirect from the index page to the unrecognized page is a 303, not a 301.