How to handle "2" homepages?
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Came across an interesting problem. A site has the traditional homepage of site.com and ranks okay.
Later I found that another "homepage", site.com/home.html that ranks well for several terms but actually has old branding and semi-up-to-date content.
Site.com/home.html has a solid linking profile but not as strong as the current homepage (site.com).
The question I have is should I try to salvage the page or 301 redirect to site.com?
Thank for the help!
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First...... before you do anything...
Run analytics on both versions of the homepage to see how much traffic they are bringing in, where it is coming from and if it is converting.
Only then are you in a position to decide what to do.
If one page has very different traffic than the other you might lose more by redirecting than improving the page and running it separately.
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I would 301 the /home.html version to site.com. This will consolidate all of the link juice and create one stronger page. Figure out what terms the /home.html page is ranking for, and consider adding some keywords and content to your site.com homepage if they are still relevant and useful to your current site.
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Either way i would redirect one of them. You could also use canonical urls to send juice back to the first page if the content is slightly different and still viable. Either way will work.
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I'd expect you'll find, if you look closer at the inbound links site.com/home has, they'll explain why it's ranking for those terms.
And, in such a case, I'd expect you'll generate similar rankings with site.com once the 301 carries - which is what I'd recommend doing.
Unless (there's always an "unless") there's another page on the site relevant to what site.com/home is ranking for (or you could build one) - in which case, you can use that 301 to send that link juice to that deeper page. Never a bad thing to build deep links, but I'd want to be sure the topic is a match. (Again, I'd take a look at those links and their anchor text.)
Without knowing the specifics I'd say 9 out of 10 times you want to achieve a canonical home page URL and consolidate link juice by redirecting all alternative home page URLs to site.com via 301.
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