Will changing my home page cause rankings to drop?

[tdawson09]

We are looking at doing a major change with our website. Upper management is wanting to have our home page be our store page, instead of just a landing page. So basically we would be eliminating our current home page, and replacing it with our store page. This is a very large site and our current home page gets a lot of traffic. Issues to deal with will be ranking of the current page content; Internal links to both pages; external links (backlinks) pointing to the two pages, and of course, a potential drop in rankings and traffic.

Any ideas on how to best do this? Or not do it at all. 301 redirect?

Thanks,

Brad

[irvingw]

Is the bounce rate on the homepage high? Leave the store page and make the homepage more conversion friendly is my recommendation. I understand them wanting to get the user one click closer, but not really the best solution, try to mimic the store page on the home page a bit a keep track of changes and increases or decreases so you can revert if need be.

FYI look at the links in your left nav here http://www.iboats.com/aboutus.html  and also your global footer, you are nofollowing internal links, this is throwing away precious page juice.

[HashtagHustler]

I do in house SEO right now for a company, and I feel your pain. I'm in a very similar situation! I get to blow off some creative steam on these forums. I'm doing basically the exact same thing you are doing. I literally just finished 421 301's about 15 mins ago. Sigh.

The woes of upper management! If only they would listen!

[tdawson09]

HashtagHustler;

Thanks for taking the time to respond. This change is a tough one. If you've every worked for a company with in-house SEO, it is a balancing act to accommodate what Upper Management wants, and still maintain best practices, rankings and traffic.

I feel the best option is what you suggested, that of leaving the store there and addition to the home page, but upper management is not buying that option, so I'm trying to find the best way to do this without too much damage. I feel the home page will take a hit in rankings, I just want to minimize the damage as much as possible. My task is to make sure that the linking networks are carried over, move over the content and images, and then 301 the store page to the new home page.

I will probably set up a roll back plan, if the rankings tank.

As for the forum. We have a very successful forum on a sub-domain, that does very well for us. We also have an active blog.

Thanks for your input.

[HashtagHustler]

Brad,

"I'm sorry this Moz Response is so long, I didn't have the time to make it short" -Blaise Pascal

I agree with everything said above and I want to expand on what Mike said about replacing the pages. Just looking at the two pages from an analytic standpoint your PA drops 10 points. That is probably a combination of how the pages are optimized, the amount of links going out, links coming in, etc.

In my humble opinion, and trust me I am merely a peon amongst SEOmnipotent members on this forum, it might be worth the time putting some calls to action & to make the home page LOOK more like the store, and from there it just ports you over.

You said yourself that the homepage is getting a lot of traffic. Personally, before taking the risk of switching the homepage and doing something drastic like altering the architecture I would look at trying to drive traffic organically to your store.

Your website is full of great potential resources which will help you rank. Google is in the business of providing information. The boating community for example, could be a GREAT place to throw some extra time and try and generate more traffic and interaction.

EGOL & RobertFisher both answered a question for me the other day and provided some great insight about general SEO best practices and driving traffic. EGOL also followed up with a fantastic article which talked about Google's EAT program. Having a boating forum could help your SEO immensely, which could help your ranking, which in turn could help your sales.

EAT Article: http://www.thesempost.com/google-rewrites-quality-rating-guide-seos-need-know/

It's all a big cycle. Good luck!

I think that was a lot more than you were asking, but I couldn't help!

[Mike.NW]

Yes, 301 redirect is the best option but remember 301 is PERMANENT! For temporary changes use 302.

I am a little confused why management wants to replace the home-page with the store page? I would have to know more about the company and the logic behind the decision (proof of why it would improve conversions). If that has not been explored through behavioral tracking I would be hesitant on doing the redirect.

Besides that you are correct with the complications. Remember is takes some time for Google to crawl the site index the redirect and give the trust and ranking to the new page. If you have a lot of traffic this will happen quicker. Also, keywords from the home-page will take a hit and change after sometime as well.

MOZ article about redirects, the best practices and installation.

Good Luck!