Moving our current homepage to a new URL
-
Our homepage currently speaks to a specific product and we're re-doing our homepage to be more about the brand which links to the product. The current home page has PA of 62 with thousands of links to the page. Question is are there any best practices around this or any risks?
So current page is:
www.xyz.com which we will be refreshing then moving the existing content
to
www.xyz.com/product so all the subdirectories gets shifted over 1
Thank in advance for the help!
-
So right now, we have www.pokki.com that is really our app store that we're using as our home page (nm the bad title tags / metadata etc that we will be addressing as well). We then have a page that is "What Is" pokki page that is written more in the tone of what our new homepage is going to be. The existing home page doesn't give users an idea of what the product does so we want to change it so that our home page will be more contextual and it will then link to the app store page from there (instead of vice versa today).
What we will do is redo the content that is currently on the What Is page, which we will then 301 redirect to www.pokki.com, then move the content that is currently on the homepage to www.pokki.com/apps.
From a keyword search perspective, the new home page should actually strengthen our positioning as there will be a lot more text/content that speaks specifically to the product.
Hope this clarification helps. I'm thinking there shouldn't be a prob, but just wanted to make sure.
-
I am in 100% agreement with Jared. I especially agree with his suggestion to have some kind of obvious, prominent link from the home page to this main product. Be prepared to ride out a dip in rankings, traffic etc. It might not be a bad idea to read Seth Godin's book The Dip as you go through this process
-
If you have one main product then make the homepage target both your brand name (as primary target) and your product as the secondary target.
<title>My Brand Name | My Main Product</title>
especially if you are already getting traffic to the homepage for your product.
-
Definitely to reiterate Dana, need more info about the specifics because yes there could be disastrous effects if not done properly.
Besides meta refresh, there are other things to consider. Probably most importantly is the positioning of the home page in search results for the 'product'. If you are ranking top 5 for your product keywords, and the ranking page is your home page, you may find that when you rework your home page to reflect your brand, you lose that positioning.
If you were moving from one landing page to another (i.e. /products to say /products/buy, it would be a bit different because you could 301 the /products page and officially tell Google and other SEs that you are simply moving the page. You cannot, obviously, do this with the root domain (301) or that would defeat the branding purpose.
I would definitely check positioning and revenue for your money keywords first. Also, once you move the product, i would at the very least have a link in the main navigation of the home page that links directly to the product with the appropriate anchor. If you only have one product, or one product set, i would also encourage you to optimized the URL (i.e. instead of /product it could be /
Still need more info to make solid recommendations.
-
Good question. From my understanding, there's no move in a sense of using redirects e.g. Meta Refresh. We're refreshing the existing domain page with new content, and what is now on www.xyz.com just will now be on www.xyz.com/product.
There was a mistake in my initial question, the sub-pages will not get shifted, there is only one page that is affected which is the current page on the domain. This is the case because those pages were already nested within www.xyz.com/product beforehand.
-
Are you planning on achieving this via a Meta Refresh? (I thought I'd better ask first before officially shouting "Danger, Danger Will Robinson!")
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
-
Change SEO focus from homepage to other page on the domain
Hi, we are (were) ranking top 5 with gietvloer-wand.nl by focussing the homepage for a certain keyword. We're trying to change to focus from the homepage to /gietvloeren with more content / information. How to go about this? how to tell Google that /gietvloeren is more relevant / important then than the homepage? Or any experiences how long it will take for Google to see that the page has more information than the homepage? It's a test and any experiences you can share would be great. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Heers0 -
Value of URL Changes
Hi Guys, I have a question. Each product listed on my webstie has product number like /product.php?id=3624. After I spent many hours with MOZ, I figured out that this approach is wrong and I should use the product name as URL to achieve better SEO performance. Now I am planing to change the URL generating algoritm but should I do it for existing products. Some of them have already been linked to external websites. I am thinking to create mirror URLs but this may cause rather damage on my website. Do you know what is the right answer? Best, Tony
On-Page Optimization | | Threeding.com0 -
Site not showing up in Google search since move
Hi, hoping someone might help me with some answer(s) as to why our site no longer shows up in Google search results. Even when we type the full name and city into Google, the site is absent. Our Facebook page, LinkedIn and some backlinks show, but our site is missing. I can no longer find it in Google places. I'm sure I've done something wrong since moving from a static (flash-based) site to Wordpress. But the robots.txt file looks okay to me and the sitemap.xml file is present. Anyway, this is what happens when you ask a network technician handle website design... We know just enough to be dangerous! Here is the site in question: www.newfrontiertechnologies.com located in Shoreline WA. Any advice is much appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | NFTECH0 -
Removing text from Homepage - Bad idea?
Hi Mozzers, I've just read this great article: http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-build-a-great-online-fashion-brand-34-things-that-really-amazing-fashion-retailers-do I'm working with my wife on a small (hopefully, growing) fashion website www.vintageeheirloom.com One of the points was not to directly sell on the homepage, rather draw customers into different areas of the site. Seems good advice and it's followed by many big brands online. As a small company, doing fairly well for some targeted keywords, do you think it would be a good or bad idea for me to remove most, or all of the text on my homepage. The main emphasis of our site is vintage Chanel and using the tool nTopic I score 99% relevancy for 'Vintage Chanel'. Removing would certainly affect this. Obviously I could amend my Vintage Chanel shopping category to include all this. I'd be grateful if you have any thoughts / similar experience. Thanks ! Kevin
On-Page Optimization | | well-its-1-louder0 -
Changing url in connection with meta title inconsistency
We run a site, which is a directory type one, where visitors can look for local businesses per city as well (at some point similar to the 'Yelp concept'). Now, we use www.example.com as the homepage, and the www.example.com/city1, where city1 is the capital of our country, is 301 redirected to the homepage, so this is your default setting. When you choose e.g city2, your url changes to www.example.com/city2, and the city value is stored in a cookie. Then, when you leave the session, and return to the site later on, you will see the homepage url, but with your previous choice of city (in case you let cookies be stored). My concern is, that the meta title always contains the chosen city name, so when you return to the website, and you previously used city2, you will now see the homepage url (which normally belongs to city1), but with the meta title of city2 or with any other previously chosen city. Does this mean a problem, and should I always use the correct url, which would be www.example.com/cityX, or this could not cause a problem for me? If it does, would you mind sharing me the exact problems as well? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Dilbak0 -
URL for location pages
Hello all We would like to create clean, easy URLs for our large list of Location pages. If there are a few URLs for each of the pages, am I right when I'm saying we would like this to be the canonical? Right now we would like the URL to be: For example
On-Page Optimization | | Ferguson
Domain.com/locations/Columbus I have found some instances where there might be 2,3 or more locations in the same city,zip. My conclusion for these would be: adding their Branch id's on to the URL
Domain.com/locations/Columbus/0304 Is this an okay approach? We are unsure if the URL should have city,State,zip for SEO purposes?
The pages will have all of this info in it's content
BUT what would be best for SEO and ranking for a given location? Thank you for any info!0 -
Random Products on Homepage?
On our homepage, would having 8 randomly selected products from your catalogue (some of which contain keywords) be good, bad or have no effect on rankings? The proucts change with every refresh. Some may remain the same, but just change position.
On-Page Optimization | | filarinskis0 -
Seeking URL Advice
Hey Moz Community, I'm looking for some URL structure advice for a new directory of a website. We're trying to rank for the term 'internships abroad in <country>'</country> We have roughly 100 pages targeting specific countries. Right now the URL structure is www.gooverseas.com/internships-abroad/china, but some of my colleagues believe this structure would be better: www.gooverseas.com/internships-abroad/intern-in-china. I personally prefer the shorter structure, but we couldn't come to any agreement so we thought we'd pose the question to the community. Any thoughts? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | dunklea0