How to handle "2" homepages?
-
Came across an interesting problem. A site has the traditional homepage of site.com and ranks okay.
Later I found that another "homepage", site.com/home.html that ranks well for several terms but actually has old branding and semi-up-to-date content.
Site.com/home.html has a solid linking profile but not as strong as the current homepage (site.com).
The question I have is should I try to salvage the page or 301 redirect to site.com?
Thank for the help!
-
First...... before you do anything...
Run analytics on both versions of the homepage to see how much traffic they are bringing in, where it is coming from and if it is converting.
Only then are you in a position to decide what to do.
If one page has very different traffic than the other you might lose more by redirecting than improving the page and running it separately.
-
I would 301 the /home.html version to site.com. This will consolidate all of the link juice and create one stronger page. Figure out what terms the /home.html page is ranking for, and consider adding some keywords and content to your site.com homepage if they are still relevant and useful to your current site.
-
Either way i would redirect one of them. You could also use canonical urls to send juice back to the first page if the content is slightly different and still viable. Either way will work.
-
I'd expect you'll find, if you look closer at the inbound links site.com/home has, they'll explain why it's ranking for those terms.
And, in such a case, I'd expect you'll generate similar rankings with site.com once the 301 carries - which is what I'd recommend doing.
Unless (there's always an "unless") there's another page on the site relevant to what site.com/home is ranking for (or you could build one) - in which case, you can use that 301 to send that link juice to that deeper page. Never a bad thing to build deep links, but I'd want to be sure the topic is a match. (Again, I'd take a look at those links and their anchor text.)
Without knowing the specifics I'd say 9 out of 10 times you want to achieve a canonical home page URL and consolidate link juice by redirecting all alternative home page URLs to site.com via 301.
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
-
Local SEO: Is an equivalent of "practitioner listings" allowed for tradesmen, such as plumbers - in GMB (Google My Business)
I note practitioner listings are in place for certain professionals, so you can list your business address and then your individual name - one under a "practice listing" - the other under a "practitioner listing". As detailed here: https://whitespark.ca/blog/best-practices-for-practitioner-listings-on-google-my-business-gmb/ But can a self-employed tradesman do the same - for example a carpenter may have their workshop and be available for onsite work, so can they list their "carpentry business/brand name" and then their "personal name" they are also known by? Even if it is the same address.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LukeRow0 -
Ranking for homepage & category page?
We lost our Google organic ranking (position 1 - 3) for our highest converting key phrase (cotton tees) in February. The ranking was for our homepage (brandname.com) which is very image heavy and doesn't have much readable content. We noticed that all of our competitors are ranking above us for their category page, not their homepage. The difference between us and our competitors is that we specialize in this key phrase and they just offer one category of the key phrase. For example, we only sell cotton tee's and they sell cotton tees, handbags and shoes. When we dropped we noticed that Google began showing our homepage AND category page in the results, so we pointed our brandname.com to brandname.com/cotton-tees canonically. The idea was that this would assure that the homepage and category page were not competing with each other. The homepage was not really optimized for cotton tees so we thought this might help. 1. Is there any harm in removing the canonical and allowing both pages to rank? (We're also working on redesigning the homepage to add more readable text & optimize for cotton tees.) 2. Our homepage URL used to be "brandname.com/cotton-tees" and we consistenly ranked between 1 and 3 for cotton tees during that time. We modified the homepage URL because it seemed spammy and are now just "brandname.com". Does it make sense to go back to the URL with the key phrase in it if that is our main product and we want to rank for it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
Does the order matter for a rel="alternate" tag
Hi! We just launched our new mobile site and I am trying to get the rel="alternate" tags put on the desktop site. The specs had the tags formatted like this: They ended up like this: My developer is telling me the order does not matter. Can anyone confirm? Does the order matter? Thank You!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shop.nordstrom0 -
"No Index, No Follow" or No Index, Follow" for URLs with Thin Content?
Greetings MOZ community: If I have a site with about 200 thin content pages that I want Google to remove from their index, should I set them to "No Index, No Follow" or to "No Index, Follow"? My SEO firm has advised me to set them to "No Index, Follow" but on a recent MOZ help forum post someone suggested "No Index, No Follow". The MOZ poster said that telling Google the content was should not be indexed but the links should be followed was inconstant and could get me into trouble. This make a lot of sense. What is proper form? As background, I think I have recently been hit with a Panda 4.0 penalty for thin content. I have several hundred URLs with less than 50 words and want them de-indexed. My site is a commercial real estate site and the listings apparently have too little content. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
301 redirect a old site that has been "dead" for a while?
Hi guys, A quick question. I have a client who has an old business website that had some great links (Forbes.com, CocaCola.com, etc). The problem is that he knew nothing about SEO and let the hosting expire. He still owns the domain, but the site is no longer listed in Google. He did no SEO, so I am not worried about being hit by any artificial anchor text penalties, since the links are as natural as it gets. So my questions is, would there be any benefit from 301 redirecting that site to his new business? The new business is in almost exactly the same niche as the old site. I am thinking of 301'ing to a sub-page which will refer to his past venture with the old business, not to the homepage of the new site. Thanks in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
How would you handle 12,000 "tag" pages on Wordpress site?
We have a Wordpress site where /tag/ pages were not set to "noindex" and they are driving 25% of site's traffic (roughly 100,000 visits year to date). We can't simply "noindex" them all now, or we'll lose a massive amount of traffic. We can't possibly write unique descriptions for all of them. We can't just do nothing or a Panda update will come by and ding us for duplicate content one day (surprised it hasn't already). What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak1 -
Our site has been up almost 2 months and no rankings yet?
Our site is www.AkinsSeptic.com. We spent a lot of time on the site and have not received any rankings yet. Can you advise as to what we can do to get this site ranked at all. I know it needs a lot of SEO work and some links, however, it should rank mildly due to the low competition of keywords we are using. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tormz0 -
Question about "launching to G" a new site with 500000 pages
Hey experts, how you doing? Hope everything is ok! I'm about to launch a new website, the code is almost done. Totally fresh new domain. The site will have like 500000 pages, fully internal optimized of course. I got my taticts to make G "travel" over my site to get things indexed. The problem is: to release it in "giant mode" or release it "thin" and increase the pages over the time? What do you recomend? Release the big G at once and let them find the 500k pages (do they think this can be a SPAM or something like that)? Or release like 1k/2k per day? Anybody know any good aproach to improve my chances of success here? Any word will be apreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | azaiats20