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Thomas is making the right point that you do always want your domain to point to your homepage.  How you "name" it depends on the platform you are using. Mine was a Wordpress question. But a traditional website used to call the homepage index.html and the browser or server knows to resolve to that for the homepage.

That's oversimplified, but the point is that it depends on the platform, but regardless of how you get there, you want your domain to go to your homepage.

Tom,

I appreciate your reply and attempt to help. But I'm not sure you understand what I am asking.  I understand the concept of the root domain and redirect, etc well.

The primary domain, will definitely resolve to the homepage.  My question is fairly Wordpress specific. When you create a new page or post you give it a title.  Calling it "home" makes it easy to find on the admin side  in the list of pages.

Whatever page I set as the "homepage" in the Wordpress admin settings, then the domain will resolve to that page no matter what I call it. And no one has to add the title as part of the URL or anything after the / to get there.

I could leave off the title of the page completely. It's not ideal for when I hand it off to clients. (People like things to be clearly labeled what they are.)  But is that what you are suggesting I always do?

I work almost exclusively in wordpress now. And I always hesitate when it comes to naming a site's homepage. I have to give it a name -  right? I usually pick the business name or /home. And then that is identifies as the site's static homepage in the Wordpress settings and it works just fine.

But I've started to get warning that it is an issue because it creates redirects.  For example, I just ran the Ryte service analysis on a website and it warned me about "Non-indexable pages with high relevance" and it's basically my homepage that has 29 incoming links that "passes all pagerank to https://ourdomain/home

But what am I supposed to call my homepage if not "Home"? It's not like the old days where anyone has to type it in. The root domain loads the homepage just as it should.

Can anybody advise me regarding best practices for what to name a Wordpress homepage for good SEO?

With thanks in advance for your help.

Stephen,

I just came across this article that says it will show you how to find your 404 errors using Google Analytics. I thought you might still be interested.

https://www.rebelytics.com/404-errors-google-analytics/

Dandelion

Yes! That is what I definitely meant to say. My apologies for the confusion!

In my case, I was able to discover the exact images because the plugin tells me what files were requested but not found each week. If you aren't using wordpress - hmmm, it has been a while since i managed a large non-wordpress site.

But i think there is a report in Google Analytics that tells you the file not found pages and maybe it had the images too.  Or maybe I am thinking of Web Trends analytics. Your Google Search Console might be a good resource - it has lots of crawl data. Screaming frog might be able to find them - it has so many reports I would not be surprised. I'm sorry I don't know for sure.

I'll be curious what you find!

Yes - that is the gist of my concerns. But I don't know...I think "cornerstone content" is an SEO strategy term, not something that Google defines and associates with only pages. Because there are lots of bloggers who have hundreds of posts and only a few pages and who plan for certain pages or categories to be their cornerstone content.

Thanks Miriam!

No - the post pages are pretty seamless as far as the user is concerned. I didn't realize they were posts myself until I had admin access and started looking for the pages to edit. I have a little duplicate content to deal with re the top level page (category page) but it's not a big issue.

I think then, unless someone new posts with compelling reasons to change them, that I will leave them as they are in my existing site, and make them pages in my new sites.

Thanks for your input Don!

Do you have an SEO reason to recommend the change? Or are you like me, and just like pages to be pages and posts to be posts? I mean, I could just leave it like it is.  I am mostly trying to figure out if there are any good reasons to leave it like it is.

Hi Stephen,

While I can't offer you the definitive answer to your question, I wanted to share an idea. I recently started using a plug-in called Redirection on one of my sites. When I started working with it I was surprised to see how much traffic was coming to old images and that I could set up a redirect for them.  I had not really considered the idea of setting a 301's for individual images.

Reading your issue my thought was maybe you set up some pages  - more friendly and useful than a 404 - that say how the product is discontinued, but maybe they would like such and such instead...something still trying to help them out. So maybe you have a page like that for each artist. Then set up 404's for the popular but discontinued image that goes to one of those custom pages.

Good luck!

I have started working with a few law firms this year. They already have websites and I am doing various marketing tasks such as copywriting, redesigns, and, of course, SEO.

In a couple of cases I was surprised to find that they had made the pages describing their various practice areas post content. I'm not sure why. But I suspect that the idea might have been to have the phrase: /practice-areas/ as a part of their URL.

I didn't really like the idea of treating pages like posts. It seems a bit like working the system. But apart from that, wouldn't pages have a higher value as "permanent" content? As posts - their publish date has more weight, right? And they'd get old? But maybe the previous developers were on to something and the category/post approach to listing practice areas is the way to go?

I am starting a new site for a new firm and I'd like to feel more confident about the right structure to choose for this kind of website before I start.

Does anybody know the right answer?

Thanks!

Thank you!

Yep - I redirect the .html files to the https domain to as specific a page as possible. Its good to know that I don't have to factor in the CNAME or A records into the issue.

It sounds like I am doing the right things from what you say - yet I do have some redirect chain warnings in my Moz crawl.

Hello,

I am trying to minimize my redirect chains that have been popping up in my Moz crawl issues. So I'd like to get clear on some best practices. I have a few clients that are getting their first redesign in a while. We are moving into Wordpress from good ole .html files. So I've installed a redirection plug in to create 301 redirects for those .html versions of the pages.

But apparently I am already redirecting from www to non-www. I have the www set up as a CNAME going to the IP address - is that counting as the redirection? Sometimes though, the www is set up by making it an A record. Is one way better than the other?

Finally, I'm forcing https for all my new sites now. Is whatever the host does to "force" https also counting as a redirect and contributing to my chain?

Any advice will be appreciated!

Sounds like it is what Moz does, not what Localeze and Acxiom do. It seems like the only way they would know to change it back is because Moz tells them to revert.