Client would like to 301 redirect the homepage to a category page
-
Hello MOZ Community!!!
I would like your expert opinions on a scenario, please!
My client is an ecommerce company, and currently has one of its category pages outranking its homepage for a few key phrases. The homepage, however, has a better conversion rate. So, the client is asking that we make the homepage the category URL, so http://www.theirsite.com/blue-clothes. The existing homepage URL - http://www.theirsite.com - would 301 REDIRECT to the category page - which would render the current version of the homepage.
Therefore, there would be nothing, ZERO content, on the MAIN URL: http://www.theirsite.com
Has anyone ever done this before? What are the pros and the cons of this practice?
Here is my same client, for reference: https://moz.com/community/q/issue-with-category-ranking-on-page-1-vs-homepage-ranking-on-page-2
-
Really appreciate this, thank you!
-
There are a lot of theoretical reasons...
1. In redirecting the homepage, you could potentially lose or dampen the results that the homepage currently enjoys (while not as much as the internal page, at least it has some)
2. The redirect might not successfully pass on all link juice (ie: perhaps some link decay rate is applied)
3. You lose the great potential opportunity of getting double listings for keywords!
-
Russ, would you be able to let me know why it is a bad idea to redirect to an internal page? I need to let the client know the cons of this practice.
-
Hi Russ, I completely agree. Thank you!
-
I'm completely agree with Russ Jones, also wouldn't recommend to redirect homepage to internal page.
Thanks
-
I have seen websites rank well using internal pages as their homepage, and have worked on quite a few. However, I wouldn't recommend it. Why not simply improve the conversion rate of the internal page by improving its layout?
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
-
Product page as homepage
Hello, Is it ok that to use the homepage of website as a product page directly where you present all your products on your homepage or can it penalise you to do that ? and in that case, is it better to have a homepage that you don't rank and create a subpage for your product page. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Huge httaccess with old 301 redirects. Is it safe to delete all redirects with no traffic in last 2 months?
We have a huge httaccess file over several MB which seems to be the cause for slow server response time. There are lots of 301 redirects related to site migration from 9 months ago where all old URLs were redirected to new URL and also lots of 301 redirects from URL changes accumulated over the last 15 years. Is it safe to delete all 301 redirects which did not receive any traffic in last 2 months ? Or would you apply another criteria for identifying those 301 that can be safely deleted? Any way to get in google analytics or webmaster tools all 301 that received traffic in the last 2 months or any other easy way to identify those, apart from checking the apache log files ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
How long should I keep the 301 redirect file
We've setup an new site and many pages don't exist anymore (clean up done). But for many of them we have new pages with new url's. We've monitored the 404 and have now many URL's redirected with 301 (apache file). How long should we keep this in place? Checking all links manually to see of new url is in place of the old url (in google) is too much work. tx!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KBC0 -
Help... To Optimize Category Page or Not?
My question is about whether to optimize a category page or not, but it’s a rather odd situation. Here’s a bit of background to start. When we relaunched our site, about six months ago, we had primary, secondary, and tertiary categories created. A user could reach all three levels by clicking through the site. Then we decided instead of linking to the tertiary categories, that we’d turn them into filters which can be applied at the secondary level. Thus, there is not actually a direct link to the 3rd level categories on the site. An important side note, I did check and confirm they are still included in the sitemap file. My initial thoughts were to forget any further optimization of those 3rd level categories, but as it turns out we still have rankings for some of them. Now the question… Because some of these pages are ranking and are found in the sitemap, should I include them in my SEO plan to build up and optimize, or because they are no longer linked to directly on the site will they eventually fizzle out (and I shouldn’t do anything further). This is such a unique situation that I am really looking for some insight from the community. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Do I eventually 301 a page on our site that "expires," to a page that's related, but never expires, just to utilize the inbound link juice?
Our company gets inbound links from news websites that write stories about upcoming sporting events. The links we get are pointing to our event / ticket inventory pages on our commerce site. Once the event has passed, that event page is basically a dead page that shows no ticket inventory, and has no content. Also, each “event” page on our site has a unique url, since it’s an event that will eventually expire, as the game gets played, or the event has passed. Example of a url that a news site would link to: mysite.com/tickets/soldier-field/t7493325/nfc-divisional-home-game-chicago bears-vs-tbd-tickets.aspx Would there be any negative ramifications if I set up a 301 from the dead event page to another page on our site, one that is still somewhat related to the product in question, a landing page with content related to the team that just played, or venue they play in all season. Example, I would 301 to: mysite.com/venue/soldier-field tickets.aspx (This would be a live page that never expires.) I don’t know if that’s manipulating things a bit too much.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ticket_King1 -
Redirect or Rewrite? 2 pages ranking
We have two pages ranking for "Custom Web Design" http://www.imageworksstudio.com/custom-web-design ranks higher (consistently 9-13) and http://www.imageworksstudio.com/content/custom-web-design ranks around 35-40 the latter is actually an older version of the article that never was replaced or taken down - but it has the majority of the links to it Wondering if we should update the old content so it is not similar to the one that is ranking better or if we should redirect everything to /custom-web-design to see if it can secure better rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900 -
Does 301 redirect to a new domain removes penguin penality
Hi, One of my client has shady link profile and has hit by penguin update. I have confirmed the penalty using Google hack. Now, seeing his link profile, most of his links comes from blog comments which are from unmoderated blogs, and there is no way, we cant remove those comments. But without removing them, we cant get rid of the Google's penguin penality. So, i am planning on 301 redirecting to a new domain. But my question is, will the penality transfers, if i 301 to a new domain? What iff, if someone buys an old domain hit by a penguin update? Please clarify me, or if there are any alternatives to get rid of penguin update, please help me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Indexxess0 -
Reverse Proxy better than 301 redirect?
Are reverse proxies that much better than 301 redirects? Should I invest the time in doing this? I found out about reverse proxies here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianmcc0