Is the sun online newspaper right with their home page

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi, i made my home page shorter here www.in2town.co.uk because a couple of people on here said i should shorten my home page but i have noticed that the sun newspaper and other online newspapers have now made their home page longer, is this a good idea or a bad idea.

Here is the sun newspaper http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/

The reason why i done it in the first place was to allow as much info to be on the home page as possible, showing all the different sections on my site and allow google to see as well as our visitors how often the site gets updated.

I would love to hear your thoughts on if we should make our home page longer again like the sun newspaper or if you think this is a bad idea.

[ClaireH-184886]

thanks for that. what i want is for google to see that the site is getting refreshed with new content and for people to see all the new articles instead of not knowing where to look

[SteveBrumpton]

Hello Diane,

I'd say this decision comes down to what term you want your homepage to rank for.  When targetting specific keywords on a page that contains a diverse range of content in can be difficult for Google to identify just what precisely the page is about, so you lose out in the SERPS to more specialised competitors.

If your aim is to get individual stories to rank for longer search queries then linking them off the homepage is a good idea.  Your homepage probably passes the most page rank through your site so anything linked off the homepage is likely to get a rankings boost (over things only filed away under categories)

I'd consider analytics as the best measure of which homepage style works for you.  I'd guess a longer page with more content will get you a lower bounce rate and more time spent on the page.  It probably makes it easier for people to find a story that interests them so average no. of page views could be higher too.

If you want to be more specific, targetting one key term or just want a few specific stories to rank then a shorter homepage will probably work better.

Steve