Will removing the main nav from the homepage penalize the site?
-
I have a client who offers residential and commercial services. We are dividing up the site into two sections that distinguish between these services and the clients. On the homepage, we ask site visitors to first choose from the Commercial or Residential services. I don't want to have any main navigation options on the homepage because they will change depending on whether you select the commercial option or the residential. Will this hurt the site in terms of SEO? Are there any suggestions of how to structure the home nav so it is not confusing to the visitor, but won't hurt the optimization of the site?
Thank you.
-
Thank you Alan, My only thoughts are that if a visitor needed to contact the company the first place they would look is the main navigation and if there is none they would be forced to select an option to continue, 'residential' or 'commercial' which may confuse or annoy site visitors.
-
Ben that's a good point - I apologize for not saying so in my original reply - so in addition to having the to large visual links, or having two large boxes on that home page, having the Home | About Us | Home Products | Commercial Products | Contact Us link nav on the home page would also be quite beneficial - both for SEO and visitors. It lends credibility and usability to the experience.
-
The links I suggested are still important, and purely having two link seems a waste of space.
You would want to have a url similar to:
www.domain.com/residential-products/category/product-one
www.domain.com/commercial-products/category/product-one
Personally I dont see any benefit to removing a perfectly good navigation bar from the homepage. you could still have the main navigation menu as I previously mentioned but make the two sections for residential and commercial products prominent on the homepage.
-
yeah let me know if you need me to provide any clarity for the design mock-up process. glad to help!
-
Thank you Alan!
-
The SEO best practice is that your home page should have links to the most important pages on the site. So technically, just linking to each of the two primary sections you are doing that, given that each section's "home" page is important. Except that means your actual residential services top level services page and your commercial services top level services pages wouldn't be linked from the home page.
Yes, you can mitigate the problem using a solution similar to how Ben describes. However, I recommend that your main Residential landing page and your main Commercial landing page actually be the Services page for each - literally where you describe those services AND link to each of the services through a sidebar navigation in addition to that sections main topbar navigation.
Make sense?
- Alan - Click2Ranks Search Team Director
-
On the home page I would suggest having a menu so search engines know other pages exists within the site, maybe something like:
Home | About Us | Home Products | Commercial Products | Contact Us
Maybe have a footer menu on all sites with: Contact Us | Privacy Policy | Terms & Conditions etc.
In the grand scheme of things, not having a navigation menu on the homepage shouldn't be a deal breaker as long as you have an xml sitemap listing all pages on the site.
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
-
Site redesign makes Moz Site Crawl go haywire
I work for an agency. Recently, one of our clients decided to do a complete site redesign without giving us notice. Shortly after this happened, Moz Site Crawl reported a massive spike of issues, including but not limited to 4xx errors. However, in the weeks that followed, it seemed these 4xx errors would disappear and then a large number of new ones would appear afterward, which makes me think they're phantom errors (and looking at the referring URLs, I suspect as much because I can't find the offending URLs). Is there any reason why this would happen? Like, something wrong with the sitemap or robots.txt?
Technical SEO | | YYSeanBrady1 -
Site Not Being Indexed
Hey Everyone - I have a site that is being treated strangely by google (at least strange to me) The site has 24 pages in the sitemap - submitted to WMT'S over 30 days ago I've manually triggered google to crawl the homepage and all connecting links as well and submitted a couple individually. Google has been parked the indexing at 14 of the 24 pages. None of the unindexed URL's have Noindex or follow tags on them - they are clearly and easily linked to from other places on the site. The site is a brand new domain, has no manual penalty history and in my research has no reason to be considered spammy. 100% unique handwritten content I cannot figure out why google isn't indexing these pages. Has anyone encountered this before? Know any solutions? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | CRO_first0 -
What will be the future of seo ?
this question may sound like old one but i want to know something in depth. i mean will seo live forever ? Will i loose my seo job ? so just wanted to know what will be the future of seo ?
Technical SEO | | isolve1 -
"Site:" without Homepage, Why?
Hi all, When I put "site:bettingexchange.it" on www.google.it in the SERP it's NOT showed the HOMEPAGE "bettingexchange.it". Google starts with other pages lik "bettingexchange.it/siti/". It's the first time I see something like this, How is it possibile?
Technical SEO | | bettingexchange
How can I reintroduce the homepage?0 -
If you are organizing the site structure for an ecommerce site, how would you do it?
Should you use not use slashes and use all dashes or use just a few slashes and the rest with dashes? For example, domain.com/category/brand/product-color-etc OR domain.com/anythinghere-color-dimensions-etc Which structure would you rather go for and why?
Technical SEO | | Zookeeper0 -
Site Crawl
I was wondering if there was a way to use SEOmoz's tool to quickly and easily find all the URLs on you site and not just the ones with errors. The site that I am working on does not have a site map. What I am trying to do is find all the URLs along with their titles and description tags. Thank you very much for your help
Technical SEO | | pakevin0 -
Site: search doesn't return homepage first
When searching for site:myclient.com their homepage doesn't appear first. I know some SEOs have reported this was a warning sign that there was a penalty. Here is what I've checked/found: Toolbar pagerank remains strong. Homepage is indexed. SEO traffic is falling, but its been gradually falling for a year now, mainly due to the client neglecting any type of marketing campaigns or link building, I believe. There was not a specific drop that could be tied to a penalty. Site remains well indexed. 62,742 of 63,021 URLs in the sitemap are indexed. Site is a large ecommerce site, so many pages are duplicate content (product descriptions). Homepage does rank #1 when searching for string of text present on the homepage. Nothing unusual in Google Webmaster Tools Search for myclient.com returns homepage with 6 expanded sitelinks under it. Google safe browsing check shows no malware. Anything else I should check?
Technical SEO | | AdamThompson0