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
-
Query for paginated URLs - Shopify
Hi there, /collections/living-room-furniture?page=2
On-Page Optimization | | williamhuynh
/collections/living-room-furniture?page=3
/collections/living-room-furniture?page=4 Is that ok to make all the above paginated URLs canonicalised with their main category /collections/living-room-furniture Also, does it needs to be noindex, follow as well? Please advice, thank you!1 -
Login Page Outranking Homepage
Hi all, I have a subscription based website with a members login. For our branded terms, this login page is outranking the homepage and we're unsure what, if anything to do about it. One suggestion was to deindex it, but the counter-argument was that we'd be taking away one of our spots on the first page. I feel from a user experience, it would be best to deindex it to try and get the homepage ranked #1 since the login page not optimised towards new visitors. Another suggestion was to just optimise the title and description to make it look a little nicer. I would love to hear your thoughts Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | CupidTeam0 -
Moving/deleting blog
I have a website with a blog attached to it. It is a wordpress blog which we have not updated since 2013. However, it has a lot of pages going back to 2010. I am moving my website to weebly so I can't move my blog over. I could recreate all the posts and make redirects to the new url. However, the posts are old and outdated so it doesn't really make sense, aside from seo. I need advice. Would I take an seo hit if i start over with a blog and leave the old posts behind? Thanks!!!
On-Page Optimization | | bhsiao0 -
URL best practices
Hi, I have a problem here, I used http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs.html instead of http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs. Hence, http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs will be caused 404 page. My question is should I change from faqs.html to faqs (no .html)? Thanks in advance any advice?
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh0 -
Canonical URLs and SEO
After publishing my new wordpress website my on page analysis shows two canonical urls on my homepage. In checking the source code the Yoast SEO plugin states my canoncial url is www.homepage.ca/ This is the only one showing. Having said this I do not add the trailing slash to anything on my url structure. Could this be why the on page analysis tool says there are 2? If so is there any way to resolve this?
On-Page Optimization | | casper4340 -
Canonical URL problem
On page analysis wanted me to add a canonical url tag. However I added then re ran the on page analysis and it came up with an error. What is the proper way to add a canonical url tag in the head of an index page? ie. add a canonical tag to www.hompeage.com/index.html would it be ? Or should I ignore this for a home page? Because I add it then run the analysis again and get this? Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical Moderate fix <dl> <dt>Canonical URL</dt> <dd>"http://www.ensoplastics.com/index.html"</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply.</dd> <dd>So do I add it or not? If I don't I get a lower page rating if I take it off I get a higher page rating with room for improvement. </dd> </dl>
On-Page Optimization | | ENSO0 -
Brand Name URL Redirecting to Actual URL
So we have already built a site under a parent company's URL: parentcompany.com And now we have their branded product lines in directories: parentcompany.com/brand-name1, and parentcompany.com/brand-name2 We also own the actual URL Brand Name 1 (which is also the exact description of the product): brandname1.com We do not yet own the URL for Brand Name 2 (which is also the exact description of the product): brandname2.com. This is because a squatter is sitting on it and is asking $10,000+ for it. What we are trying to determine is how valuable these brand name URLs are since they will be redirecting and not the actual site's primary domain name. Anybody know how much of an effect owning those and redirecting has on ranking for those brand names that are also very descriptive of the products? Would we be smarter to spend $10,000 on adwords or 10,000 on the domain? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | grayloon1 -
Homepage Hogging Too Many Keyword Ranks?
Hello: I've been the publisher and SEO for Indie Rock Cafe since starting it in 2007. It's done great, and has #1 - #5 positions in Google for many strong keywords like "best new albums", "best new bands", "top new bands", "popular indie rock songs", and so on. However, for many of the results, the homepage keeps popping up over and over again. I thought I'd done everything right to get other pages on the site to rank for top keywords. Another potential issue is that I expected the homepage to have a 6 PR by now, but it seems stuck on 5. Any ideas? Insight from SEOs and experts is always enlightening and helpful, so thank you in advance for your thoughts and advice.
On-Page Optimization | | holdtheonion0