Transitioning to a dynamic home page. Impact on SEO?
-
Home page redesign advice, please. We're a growing college textbook publishing company; a unique one in that we publish everything under an open license. Our homepage www.flatworldknowledge.com has a solid page score (80), and since our product serves several different customers/audiences -- students, faculty, bookstores -- we're transitioning to a dynamic home page approach. Returning instructors will be served a personalized faculty page, returning students a student oriented page featuring the books they've most recently accessed, and first time/anon visitors will receive a more neutral welcome page until we know more about them.
Pros, cons with this change to a dynamic homepage?
What should we be thinking about/concerned about from an SEO perspective?
How do you address title tags?
Will this approach dilute page authority?
Thanks all!
-
Thank you, George! Yes, our registered users are cookied so we can serve up pages based on their individual preferences. Has anyone else changed their homepage in that way - to a more personalized experience --love other insights on what we should be thinking about from an SEO perspective.
-
Hi Michelle,
Hopefully others will chime in on whether or not you need to worry about diluting page authority (I am not as familiar with how authority is determined and do not have an answer for you).
I do have a couple questions about how you will identify return visitors. Will you be using a cookie residing on their computer to identify them? Will they need to log in?
Perhaps a structure in which you your neutral home page is at the root and you provide a different URL to serve up content for for users that are logged in/accept cookies/or however else you will be identifying them:
www.flatworldknowledge.com - neutral home page
www.flatworldknowledge.com/students - content for returning students
www.flatworldknowledge.com/faculty - content for returning instructors
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but SEOmoz uses a similar method for PRO members. If you are logged in as a PRO member and type www.seomoz.org into the address bar and hit enter, you are sent to your PRO Dashboard page: http://www.seomoz.org/users/pro. Your site could work similarly for students and instructors. Using this type of method would address your issue with title tags and you may have an easier time producing the dynamic content from a technical standpoint as well.
Anyways, hope this helps!
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
-
Magento 2.1 Multi Store / SEO
This is quite technical but I'm hoping a Magento expert can clear this up for me. Currently my company has two websites on separate Opencart platforms. What I'm doing now is building a Magento website and using the multi store function as well as a few modules to combine the two sites, the aim being that the link juice is shared and I can focus my SEO efforts on the one site instead of two, thus reducing my workload while maintaining the benefits. This is the intended layout: www.domain.com www.domain.com/us I have created a sub-folder (not a subdomain) as this seems to be the best way to share link juice between the new, combined sites (as well as 301s from the old, redundant site). At the moment I have created 2 separate websites, stores and store views (see attached) and have configured it according to the Magento guide, so I know that technically this is correct but I need to make sure that I have done it correctly in relation to SEO. Is the sub-folder set up correctly for instance? Currently the only files to populate that sub-folder are a htaccess, error log and index.php (see attached). Also, is there anything I could be missing in relation to SEO within the parameters of what I am trying to achieve? Additionally, only one store view appears in the "change store view" section of the home page. This is causing me to question if I have set it up correctly, because I had assumed both store views would appear even if they were under different websites (attached). OR do I simply use the same website and create two stores and store views? Do I also need to create a separate database for each website/store/store view? I would very much appreciate if someone could help out here. Thank you. In1Gi7t pyfM03y nUQoMz1
Web Design | | moon-boots0 -
Does interlinking on mobile site helps in seo & improvement in rankings
Hi, Does interlinking on mobile site helps in seo & improvement in rankings. Our desktop site & mobile site has same urls. Regards
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
How can a Pincode finder website be SEO optimised?
Guys, I wanted to build a simple Pincode finder website for India. The targeted visitors as is obvious will be from India. Alike other Pincode finder websites, the users in this case too will have to key in the location / area of whose pincode he is looking for and they will get Pincode from that very location / area. Other than this, users will also come to this website when they search for something like " <location name="">pincode</location>" on Google (for instance, users will search for something like "Hiranandani Gardens Powai Pincode") Along with data fethced from our sources via Indian postal departments and other data available in public domain, we shall be using data from Google Maps API too. My question in regards to the same is as follows: What should the page-structure / structure of the website be for ranking well on Google? What should be the URL structure? Other suggestions to rank well on Google in this regards? Competition: (You can search for the term "Hiranandani Gardens Powai Pincode" to know how these sites show data) http://www.getpincode.info http://www.pincode.net.in Pls. help...
Web Design | | ShalinTJ0 -
Too Many Outbound Links on the Home Page - Bad for SEO?
Hello Again Moz community, This is my last Q of the day: I have a LOT of outbound links on the home page of www.web3.ca Some are to clients projects, most are to other pages on the website. Can reducing this to the core pages have a positive impact on SEO? Thanks, Anton
Web Design | | Web3Marketing870 -
Geo targetting and SEO
Hi all!
Web Design | | lhernandezBum
We are about to launch a new geotargetting feature on our site. Basically, nowadays we have a normal Homepage (example: myHomepage.com). Next week, the homepage will depend on your localization (checked through IP): For example, for Texans there will be a myHomepage.com/Texas (automatically redirected), for New Yorkers a myHomepage.com/Newyork. My question is, how can this affect SEO? Where will the bot go? Hopefully the answer is not "depending on where the bot is hosted"... because this can be dangerous. Also, I don't think that "telling the bot to go to a generic Homepage" is a good idea, as Google dislikes when you show them something different from the human users. Thanks0 -
Site Redesign: Bounce rate, converstion, page views, etc.
Hi Fellow Mozzers, I had a few questions regarding some analytics data we have been seeing since our redesign. Just last week we did a site design overhaul at www.lylif.com. One of the biggest changes we immediately saw was a 15-20% increase in our bounce rate. However, our conversion rates, page views, pages per visit, and site duration has increased. If anyone has some insight as to why we may be having such a large increase in our bounce rate that would be most helpful!
Web Design | | lylif11 -
Indexing Dynamic Pages
Hi, I am having an issues among others, regarding indexing dynamic pages. Our website, www.me-by-melia, was just put live and I am concerned the bottom naviagtion pages (http://www.me-by-melia.com/#store, http://www.me-by-melia.com/#facebook, etc) will not be indexed and create duplicate pages. Also, when you open these pages in a new tab, it takes you to homepage. The website was created in HTML5. Please advise.
Web Design | | Melia0 -
Page Title or Search Friendly Urls?
We are currently auditing our website as part of our SEO strategy. One item which hascome up is the importance of search friendly urls against the search engine friendly page titles. Do url's or page titles carry more relevance than the other in search engines? Obviously the ideal would be to have both to maximise search impact but do either carry more importance. Thanks
Web Design | | bwfc770