Will changing my home page cause rankings to drop?
-
We are looking at doing a major change with our website. Upper management is wanting to have our home page be our store page, instead of just a landing page. So basically we would be eliminating our current home page, and replacing it with our store page. This is a very large site and our current home page gets a lot of traffic. Issues to deal with will be ranking of the current page content; Internal links to both pages; external links (backlinks) pointing to the two pages, and of course, a potential drop in rankings and traffic.
Any ideas on how to best do this? Or not do it at all. 301 redirect?
Thanks,
Brad
-
Is the bounce rate on the homepage high? Leave the store page and make the homepage more conversion friendly is my recommendation. I understand them wanting to get the user one click closer, but not really the best solution, try to mimic the store page on the home page a bit a keep track of changes and increases or decreases so you can revert if need be.
FYI look at the links in your left nav here http://www.iboats.com/aboutus.html and also your global footer, you are nofollowing internal links, this is throwing away precious page juice.
-
I do in house SEO right now for a company, and I feel your pain. I'm in a very similar situation! I get to blow off some creative steam on these forums. I'm doing basically the exact same thing you are doing. I literally just finished 421 301's about 15 mins ago. Sigh.
The woes of upper management! If only they would listen!
-
HashtagHustler;
Thanks for taking the time to respond. This change is a tough one. If you've every worked for a company with in-house SEO, it is a balancing act to accommodate what Upper Management wants, and still maintain best practices, rankings and traffic.
I feel the best option is what you suggested, that of leaving the store there and addition to the home page, but upper management is not buying that option, so I'm trying to find the best way to do this without too much damage. I feel the home page will take a hit in rankings, I just want to minimize the damage as much as possible. My task is to make sure that the linking networks are carried over, move over the content and images, and then 301 the store page to the new home page.
I will probably set up a roll back plan, if the rankings tank.
As for the forum. We have a very successful forum on a sub-domain, that does very well for us. We also have an active blog.
Thanks for your input.
-
Brad,
"I'm sorry this Moz Response is so long, I didn't have the time to make it short" -Blaise Pascal
I agree with everything said above and I want to expand on what Mike said about replacing the pages. Just looking at the two pages from an analytic standpoint your PA drops 10 points. That is probably a combination of how the pages are optimized, the amount of links going out, links coming in, etc.
In my humble opinion, and trust me I am merely a peon amongst SEOmnipotent members on this forum, it might be worth the time putting some calls to action & to make the home page LOOK more like the store, and from there it just ports you over.
You said yourself that the homepage is getting a lot of traffic. Personally, before taking the risk of switching the homepage and doing something drastic like altering the architecture I would look at trying to drive traffic organically to your store.
Your website is full of great potential resources which will help you rank. Google is in the business of providing information. The boating community for example, could be a GREAT place to throw some extra time and try and generate more traffic and interaction.
EGOL & RobertFisher both answered a question for me the other day and provided some great insight about general SEO best practices and driving traffic. EGOL also followed up with a fantastic article which talked about Google's EAT program. Having a boating forum could help your SEO immensely, which could help your ranking, which in turn could help your sales.
EAT Article: http://www.thesempost.com/google-rewrites-quality-rating-guide-seos-need-know/
It's all a big cycle. Good luck!
I think that was a lot more than you were asking, but I couldn't help!
-
Yes, 301 redirect is the best option but remember 301 is PERMANENT! For temporary changes use 302.
I am a little confused why management wants to replace the home-page with the store page? I would have to know more about the company and the logic behind the decision (proof of why it would improve conversions). If that has not been explored through behavioral tracking I would be hesitant on doing the redirect.
Besides that you are correct with the complications. Remember is takes some time for Google to crawl the site index the redirect and give the trust and ranking to the new page. If you have a lot of traffic this will happen quicker. Also, keywords from the home-page will take a hit and change after sometime as well.
MOZ article about redirects, the best practices and installation.
Good Luck!
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
-
H1 tag- on home page - what is it best to include
is it best to have in the H1 tag 1. just our website address 2. combination of website address followed by short keywords about our website
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Will a on-page food/drink menu take away from my target keywords?
I am trying to rank for Chicago corporate events, so I am writing new content for a landing page. I have a description of our venue and why one should have a corporate event there, all content that is very rich in corporate event keywords. I then go on to say our drink packages and food packages. Overall, my actual keyword targeted content is 1/5 of the content and the other 4/5 is menu. At first I thought the more content the better, but now that I realize a lot fo the content is just saying different foods and alcohols I'm questioning my strategy. I'm going to do my metas and h1s and stuff with corporate event keywords. But is the menu going to get in the way of ranking for the corporate event keywords? Thanks in advance 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | howlusa0 -
Changing the url of a page
Hello. I would like to change the url of a page. It currently has very few inbound links. I would set up a 301 redirect to the new url. Is there anything else I should take into account before changing the url? Is there a downside to changing a url? Do inbound links carry the same value when a 301 redirect is involved? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Can a page lose ranking because it has too many bold tags?
I run a product search website for the Engineering Sector. Each of the companies listed on the website has a profile page. This page used to rank very well in google. Over the last couple of weeks these pages disappeared for google i.e they fell about 20 to 30 spots in the search results for relevant keywords like the Manufacturer Name. I was trying to analyze the page and found that Each of the Categories that the manufacturer supports was listed in "bold" and linked to the page for that category. A manufacturer can support up to 20 or 30 categories so this results in about 20 or 30 Bold keywords. Is this a bad practice? Could this be a reason for a drop in ranking or do bold keywords on a page not matter? What are your views?
On-Page Optimization | | raghavkapur0 -
Moving Top rank Page urls off my Home page and nesting them on one page? Good idea?
I am basically trying to cut down the amount of links on my home page to make it less eye boggling and move stuff around. So i have of my Urls on my home page that lead to pages that rank very well within google. My questions is can i remove those urls to a separate page to group them together and then showcase that one link to that page on my home page. Is that a good idea or i am going to loose my link juice and position in search? The physical urls on those pages wont change at all.
On-Page Optimization | | Dante130 -
Yesterday our site had a page rank of 5, today not ranked.
All pages on our site as of today are showing current page is not ranked by google, we have been page rank 5 for about 4 years now, we still seem to be showing in google searches. Anyone have any ideas as to why?
On-Page Optimization | | wcuk0 -
Impact of mobile pages on current rankings
Morning all - I've been getting a bit of traffic recently for mobile phrases, so am thinking of putting a mobile optimised page on my site which users will be automatically directed to when they visit my site. My question is though, how will this affect the rankings of those current pages which are trying to target mobile users. For example, let's say I've got a page at www.betting.com/iphone which is ranking really well for those users looking to place a few bets on their iPhone. Once I stick my mobile optimised page up anyone clicking through to this URL will be re-directed to a generic mobile landing page at a different URL. Is this likely to effect my rankings of the original www.betting.com/iphone page at all given the fact that all visitors are being immediately re-directed elsewhere? Thanks very much for your help
On-Page Optimization | | theshortstack0 -
Main landing page does not rank as good a single news article - why?
We are running several special interest websites in the German speaking market, covering outdoor sports and vacation topics. We are trying to focus on one main landing page for events and keywords, this should be number one für search engines. Besides we are producing numerous content (news, pictures, videos), which are supposed to rank well and to be found on Google News, but not to rank higher for the specific keyword than our designated landing page. It seems, that we fail with this attempt. Example one: The main page for the alpine Ski World Championships on our skiing portal www.skiinfo.de was supposed to be this one: http://magazin.skiinfo.de/3170--ski_wm_2011_garmisch-partenkirchen.html for the Keywords 'ski wm 2011' in Germany. We missed this goal. Many of our own news articles ranked higher. When searching for 'ski wm 2011' on skiinfo.de only directly after the World Championships, the main page was ranked on 33rd position - 32 of our own articles ranked higher. Why does the landing page rank worse than an article like this: http://magazin.skiinfo.de/3173-ski-wm-2011-tina-maze-gewinnt-riesenslalom-keine-deutschen-medaillen.html ? Another example: Our designated landing page for the Event 'International Mountain Summit' (a major mountaineering and climbing event in Bressanone/ITA) is this: http://www.bergleben.de/klettern/2148--international_mountain_summit.html (Keywords: international mountain summit, IMS). We are experiencing that our news articles rank higher, when they are 'fresh', this one still does: http://www.bergleben.de/klettern/2149-international-mountain-summit-4.html. Why? It would be perfect, if good content would strengthen the designated landing page. We are linking back to this landing page from each article in the breadcrumb, but this does not seem to be very successful. How can we achieve this?
On-Page Optimization | | Beatbuster0