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.
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
-
Blog page took over homepage
I don't manage to rank my homepage I am trying to rank my homepage on the product name "Rubbee" in Switzerland https://bit.ly/2S004lL, I have .ch domain and it the homepage appears nowhere in the 1 st 20 pages in Switzerland... whereas a website like this one https://bit.ly/2RYCCVT with zero text appears on the 13 th page. For your info when I put the website online over 2 years ago... my homepage was ranking on the 1 st page but since I created a blog page https://bit.ly/2UnL2aX, the blog page took over and it is now impossible to rank the homepage.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Are HTML Sitemaps Still Effective With "Noindex, Follow"?
A site we're working on has hundreds of thousands of inventory pages that are generally "orphaned" pages. To reach them, you need to do a lot of faceting on the search results page. They appear in our XML sitemaps as well, but I'd still consider these orphan pages. To assist with crawling and indexation, we'd like to create HTML sitemaps to link to these pages. Due to the nature (and categorization) of these products, this would mean we'll be creating thousands of individual HTML sitemap pages, which we're hesitant to put into the index. Would the sitemaps still be effective if we add a noindex, follow meta tag? Does this indicate lower quality content in some way, or will it make no difference in how search engines will handle the links therein?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mothner0 -
Help with Schema & what's considered "Spammy structured markup"
Hello all! I was wondering if someone with a good understanding of schema markup could please answer my question about the correct use so I can correct a penalty I just received. My website is using the following schema markup for our reviews and today I received this message in my search console. UGH... Manual Actions This site may not perform as well in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Site-wide matches Some manual actions apply to entire site <colgroup><col class="JX0GPIC-d-h"><col class="JX0GPIC-d-x"><col class="JX0GPIC-d-a"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | reversedotmortgage
| | Reason | Affects |
| | Spammy structured markup Markup on some pages on this site appears to use techniques such as marking up content that is invisible to users, marking up irrelevant or misleading content, and/or other manipulative behavior that violates Google's Rich Snippet Quality guidelines. Learn more. | I have used the webmasters rich snippets tool but everything checks out. The only thing I could think of is my schema tag for "product." rather than using a company like tag? (https://schema.org/Corporation). We are a mortgage company so we sell a product it's called a mortgage so I assumed product would be appropriate. Could that even be the issue? I checked another site that uses a similar markup and they don't seem to have any problems in SERPS. http://www.fha.com/fha_reverse shows stars and they call their reviews "store" OR could it be that I added my reviews in my footer so that each of my pages would have a chance at displaying my stars? All our reviews are independently verified and we just would like to showcase them. I greatly appreciate the feedback and had no intentions of abusing the markup. From my site: All Reverse Mortgage 4.9 out of 5 301 Verified Customer Reviews from eKomi | |
| | [https://www.ekomi-us.com/review-reverse.mortgage.html](<a class=)" rel="nofollow" title="eKomi verified customer reviews" target="_BLANK" style="text-decoration:none; font-size:1.1em;"> |
| | ![](<a class=)imgs/rating-bar5.png" /> |
| | |
| | All Reverse Mortgage |
| | |
| | |
| | 4.9 out of 5 |
| | 301 Verified Customer Reviews from eKomi |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |1 -
Which URLs were indexed 2 years ago?
Hi, I hope anyone can help me with this issue. Our french domain experienced a huge drop of indexed URLs in 2012. More than 50k URLs were indexed, after the drop less than 10k were counted. I would like to check what happened here and which URLs were thrown out of the index. So I was thinking about a comparison between todays data and the data of 2012. Unfortunately we don't have any data on the indexed pages in 2012 beside the number of indexed pages. Is there any way to check, which URLs were indexed 2 years ago?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sandra_h0 -
Is there a tool to find out if a URL has been deemed "SPAM" by GOOGLE
I am currently doing a link audit on one of my sites and I am coming across some links that appear to be spam. Is there a tool that I can plug their URL into to see if they have been deemed spam by GOOGLE?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mozd0 -
Taking up an "abondoned" domain?
Hi, As far as SEO goes, are there any direct contradictions to picking up an approximately 1 year old domain, where the only thing that has ever been on is a static "Hello world" page from a wordpress install done when the domain was created? I'm thinking about picking it up again, as if it was a totally fresh domain, add content, and do SEO on it. What are your thoughts friends? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kaince0 -
Panda 2.5
I'm sure we have all read about the latest round of Google's algorithm changes also known as the "Panda 2.5" updates. This latest update seems to have hit some pretty large press release sites including PR Newswire and Businesswire (both of these have a great page rank and domain authority making them a great tool for SEO's in regards to inbounds links). Ultimately this update has directly affected their sites traffic, keyword rankings, and the number of indexed pages in Google. But what will this do to our smaller sites that benefit from these great links? Will these panda updates continue to target these content farms and lower their domain authority? Will that extrapolate out and effect the domain authority of our sites? What are your thoughts for those of us that utilize these services, should we re-evaluate our process? I look forward to a great discussion. Regards - Kyle
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
How should we handle syndicated content on a partner site?
Say we have a subdomain with resources (resources.site.com) and a partner site (partner.com) and have an agreement to share content (I know - this isn't ideal but it's what I've got to work with). Please comment on the following: the use of cross-domain canonicals on "shared" articles an intro and/or conclusion paragraph that is unique on the site that re-publishes that could say something like "our partner over at resources.site.com recently published the following report ... yada, yada....." other meta tags to let Google know that we are not scraping, e.g. author tags any other steps we can take to ensure neither site gets "dinged" by the search engines. Thanks a bunch in advance! AK26
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | akim260