Can new content be added to a url which has a 301 redirect?

[MatthewA]

I am working on a site which is currently being redesigned. The home page currently ranks highly for relevant search terms, although on the new site the content on this page will be removed.

The solution I was considering, to preserve rankings, was to move the content on the home page to a new url, and use a 301 redirect to help preserve rankings for that particular page.

The question I have therefore, is am I able to add new content to the home page, and have this page freshly indexed accordingly?

Any thoughts or suggestions would be most welcome.

Thanks,

Matt.

[AlanMosley]

If mywebsite.com is 301'ed to some other page, then mywebsite.com will no longer be reached buy requests, so the content will never be read.

The content when talking about a 301is irrelevant, all a 301 does is redirect the request. when google follows a link to your old page it is redirected to the new page and the link juice will now fall on the new page. The content on the new page is read instead,

[LynnPatchett]

Hope I am not missing something obvious but if you are 301ing mywebsite.com then your visitors are not going to see the new homepage let alone the bots.... right?

If the phrases you are ranking for now are still relevant to the site then I would try to find a way to incorporate at least some of that content on the new homepage and then link to the full old homepage content (or a modified version of it if more suitable) from the new homepage - this new page is in effect becoming a landing page for these specific keywords (assuming that the new homepage does not manage to keep the rankings itself).

[94501]

If you are considering 301'ing the existing homepage to a new url, I would not recommend it. In most sites, the longstanding homepage is the most authoritative page. 301ing it will not pass all of that authority to the new page.

If you like the content on the old homepage, then just put it on a different url and at some point Google will figure that out. If it doesn't or takes a while, you are no worse off. Remember, the content on the existing homepage will not perform as well on a new url. But, it sounds like you've already made the choice to make the homepage content different, so that is water under the bridge.

[WilliamKammer]

Moving the content over and 301ing the old URL will do that. You'll see a dip in ranking, then a recovery period (usually weeks as opposed to months). That's your best bet when you are forced to make a move like that. Ideally, you'd find a way to keep the content where it is, but if that's not possible, then the 301 will do.

[MatthewA]

Thanks for your response William.

It was more the second scenario I was referring to, but to clarify.

Content from mywebsite.com would be moved to mywebsite.com/new-url, with 301 redirect added to mywebsite.com

New content would be added to mywebsite.com

Thanks for your clarification that bots would henceforth ignore mywebsite.com; naturally this is really not what I want.

So, really just wondering if there is an effective alternative I can use. As mentioned, the current home page is ranking well, but the redesign necessarily involves removing the current content.

Essentially I'm looking for a way to preserve rankings...

Thanks, Matt.

[WilliamKammer]

If you are referring to adding new content to the new homepage after the old home page is redirected, than yes. You can add additional content to pages that have 301s redirecting to them and they will update in the index.

If you are referring to adding content on the old homepage that is 301'd and have it update on the new page, that will not work. Browsers and bots read the .htaccess and move on. Bots won't crawl that old URL anymore.