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
-
Ranking dropped after change single page url, should I change it back?
I was making updates to the content on the following page, and a few days later dropped from #2 SERP ranking to 50+. Things I checked: Yes, 301 redirect was implemented right away. After publishing, I manually requested indexing in search console. Right after publishing I re-submitted the sitemap manually and Google said they had not crawled it in 9 days. My question: should I change the URL back to the old one, or give it a little more time (especially since I re-submitted sitemap) Original URL: https://www.travelinsurancereview.net/plans/travel-medical/ New URL: https://www.travelinsurancereview.net/plans/travel-medical-insurance/
On-Page Optimization | | DamianTysdal0 -
How will ranking keywords add on my website
Its been a lot of time since I have launched my website but I am not getting any ranking keywords can you please help me about the following factor or provide some solutions my website is about selling third-party antivirus and technical service: norton.com/setup
On-Page Optimization | | Mehakayna0 -
Will adding 1M (legitimate/correct) internal backlinks to an orphan page trip algo penalty?
We have a massive long tail user generated gamification strategy that has worked really well. Because of that success we haven't really been paying enough attention to SEO and in looking around caught some glaring issues. The section of our site that works as long tail goes from overview page > first classification > sub classification > specific long tail term page. Looks like we were relying on google to crawl/use forms to go from our overview page to the first classification BUT those resulting pages were orphaned - so www.mysite.com/product/category_1 defaulted back to the search page creating duplicate issues. www.mysite.com/product/category_1 and www.mysite.com/product/category_2 and www.mysite.com/product/category_3 all had duplicate content as they all reverted to the overview page. It's clear we need to make an actual breadcrumb trail and proper site taxonomy/linkage. I'm wanting to do this on just this one area first, but it's a big section with over 3M indexed "specific long tail term pages". I want to just add a simple breadcurmb trail in a sub navigation menu but doing so will literally create millions of new internal backlinks from specific term pages to their sub & parent category pages. Although we're missing the intermediary category breadcrumbs, we did have a breadcrumb coming back to the main overview page - that was tagged nofollow. So now I'm contemplating adding millions of (proper) backlinks and removing a nofollow tag from another million internal back links. All of this seems in line with "best practices" but what I have not been able to determine is if there is a proper/better way to roll these changes out so as to not trigger an algorithm penalty. I am also reticent about making too many changes too quickly but these are SEO 101 basics that need to be rectified. Is it a mistake to make good improvements too quickly? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | DrewProZ1 -
Too many links per page? Double navigation on every page...
I have a client with navigation across the top of each page plus the same nav links in a sidebar on every page. Can that duplication (or the sheer number of links) on each page have a negative ranking factor?
On-Page Optimization | | brm20170 -
Will changing a URL negatively affect ranking?
Hello Mozzers, We would like to change the URL for a page on our website which ranks well for some our keyphrases/words. We are hoping the change of URL, through the addition of an additional keyword would help boost the rank of that URL further. At the moment out page gets 2 x A and 2 x B 1xF on the MOZ page rank tool using 5 keyphrase/word variations . One phrase ranks 4, one ranks 3 and the other 3 are 'not in the top 50' Our plan was to change the URL, using SHF404, and use 'Fetch' in the Google search console to re-submit the page to Google. Appreciate you can't give any guarantees how Google will behave, just wondered what your thoughts were on the wisdom of changing the URL in the first place? Thanks Ian
On-Page Optimization | | Substance-create0 -
Is there any decent web browser that still displays the full page title at the top of the page?
I just updated to the latest version of Firefox on my Mac and saw that they now hide most of the page title in the browser tab, like Chrome and Safari. I like to be able to see the full page title at all times (for reasons I'm sure you all understand) and that's pretty much the only reason I stuck with Firefox all these years. Now I'm looking for an alternative – any suggestions?
On-Page Optimization | | matt-145671 -
Will it hurt my rankings if I change the permalinks so late?
I think I did something wrong in the past. My permalink structure is www.keyword.com/postname-keyword Now my website with over 1000 pages has this structure. Now I really would like to change it to a normal structure like www.keyword.com/postname But the problem is my website and its page have good authority and page rank and above 100k pageviews monthly. It will really have a big impact on my business if something goes wrong. Is it worth the risk to change it? Because now often pages who have nothing related with the keyword have the keyword in the permalink. I think this is really not good for the ranking of my subpages. Change or not to change?
On-Page Optimization | | vulonl0 -
Will deleting excess self serving links from old posts damage established ranking
My SEOmoz report showed many posts with "too many links." I can easily go back into wordpress and delete self serving links. But is there a downside to this if these posts are already ranked well on google search for the desired key words? Or will deleting the excess self serving links improve ranking
On-Page Optimization | | wianno1680