Will removing the main nav from the homepage penalize the site?
-
I have a client who offers residential and commercial services. We are dividing up the site into two sections that distinguish between these services and the clients. On the homepage, we ask site visitors to first choose from the Commercial or Residential services. I don't want to have any main navigation options on the homepage because they will change depending on whether you select the commercial option or the residential. Will this hurt the site in terms of SEO? Are there any suggestions of how to structure the home nav so it is not confusing to the visitor, but won't hurt the optimization of the site?
Thank you.
-
Thank you Alan, My only thoughts are that if a visitor needed to contact the company the first place they would look is the main navigation and if there is none they would be forced to select an option to continue, 'residential' or 'commercial' which may confuse or annoy site visitors.
-
Ben that's a good point - I apologize for not saying so in my original reply - so in addition to having the to large visual links, or having two large boxes on that home page, having the Home | About Us | Home Products | Commercial Products | Contact Us link nav on the home page would also be quite beneficial - both for SEO and visitors. It lends credibility and usability to the experience.
-
The links I suggested are still important, and purely having two link seems a waste of space.
You would want to have a url similar to:
www.domain.com/residential-products/category/product-one
www.domain.com/commercial-products/category/product-one
Personally I dont see any benefit to removing a perfectly good navigation bar from the homepage. you could still have the main navigation menu as I previously mentioned but make the two sections for residential and commercial products prominent on the homepage.
-
yeah let me know if you need me to provide any clarity for the design mock-up process. glad to help!
-
Thank you Alan!
-
The SEO best practice is that your home page should have links to the most important pages on the site. So technically, just linking to each of the two primary sections you are doing that, given that each section's "home" page is important. Except that means your actual residential services top level services page and your commercial services top level services pages wouldn't be linked from the home page.
Yes, you can mitigate the problem using a solution similar to how Ben describes. However, I recommend that your main Residential landing page and your main Commercial landing page actually be the Services page for each - literally where you describe those services AND link to each of the services through a sidebar navigation in addition to that sections main topbar navigation.
Make sense?
- Alan - Click2Ranks Search Team Director
-
On the home page I would suggest having a menu so search engines know other pages exists within the site, maybe something like:
Home | About Us | Home Products | Commercial Products | Contact Us
Maybe have a footer menu on all sites with: Contact Us | Privacy Policy | Terms & Conditions etc.
In the grand scheme of things, not having a navigation menu on the homepage shouldn't be a deal breaker as long as you have an xml sitemap listing all pages on the site.
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
-
Homepage not indexed
Hi, I have a problem with my website. From my PC, when I search for site:nobelcom.com the homepage of the website doesn't appear, but on other PCs (different IPs) it is ok.
Technical SEO | | Silviu
Also any keywords that usually responded with homepage, now responds with other page. Does anyone know way this is happening. It happen before the Penguin update, and after a fetch like google and send to index, I had the homepage back on serps0 -
SEO traffic to the homepage is down across sites
Week over week, I've noticed that organic traffic (and oftentimes revenue) for the homepage are down across most of our sites compared to last year. Brand search interest is down for a number of the brands, but in a lot of these cases, it's not down so much that it would make sense for how much the homepage is down (for example: brand search interest was down 4% last week compared to last year, but the homepage traffic was down 32% in visits). What I've done is generate entry page reports (this year vs. last year) and then bucket the pages by homepage, category pages, and product pages. In most cases, category pages are up year over year for traffic and revenue. I'm concerned that the homepage being down is more than a brand heat issue, but I haven't come across anything out of the ordinary in Google Search Console and keywords are pretty consistent in performance for the most part. Branded keywords continue to rank at #1, too. Any thoughts as to what else I can look into?
Technical SEO | | WWWSEO0 -
Redirecting old html site to new wordpress site
Hi I'm currently updating an old (8 years old) html site to wordpress and about a month ago I redirected some url's to the new site (which is in a directory) like this... Redirect 301 /article1.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article1/
Technical SEO | | briandee
Redirect 301 /article2.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article2/
Redirect 301 /article3.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article3/ Google has indexed these new url's and they are showing in search results. I'm almost finished the new version of site and it is currently in a directory /wordpress I intend to move all the files from the directory to the root so new url when this is done will be http://mysite.net/article1/ etc My question is - what to I do about the redirects which are in place - do I delete them and replace with something like this? Redirect 301 /wordpress/article1/ http://mysite.net/article1/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article2/ http://mysite.net/article2/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article3/ http://mysite.net/article3/ Appreciate any help with this0 -
Could using our homepage Google +1's site wide harm our website?
Hello Moz! We currently have the number of Google +1's for our homepage displaying on all pages of our website. Could this be viewed as black hat/manipulative by Google, and result in harming our website? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | TheDude0 -
Link removal from search rank checking sites
I'm going through the link removal process for unnatural links to a site. While I'm able to identify the obvious link profile and seo-article links that Google wants removed, what should we do about the links that are generated by the various seo link investigation and ranking services? Example: http://www.seoprofiler.com/analyze/allamericanfencing.com This site (seoprofiler) automatically creates these links to web sites when it generates its reports. Are those links that need to be removed or disavowed, or will Google not care? I want to err on the side of caution, but don't know how to treat these types of pages. The site didn't ask for or lobby for those links, so it's "natural" in that sense, but they're not editorially earned either (except for happen to be ranking for a similar term). Does anyone have experience on this aspect of the unnatural link grooming process?
Technical SEO | | CHarkins0 -
Brand New Site Penalized?
I recently launched 2 completely separate and unrelated websites at the same time. Both are new domains and hosting accounts. neither have any links. One is ranking for a branded search and the other is not. The interesting thing is that I tested both sites on the back end of my server before launch. The site that is not ranking for branded search IS ranking still on the back end of my site for the branded search. I have removed all content and 301 redirected the testing urls back to my portfolio page. Could this be do to Google indexing one but not the other. Does it have anything to do with testing on my server first and my DA being higher than current new sites? Or is it something completely different I'm missing completely. Is this a Penalty?
Technical SEO | | CDUBP0 -
Too many links on my site
Hi there everybody, I am a total SEO newbie and i am burning with questions. I had my site crawled and found out that it contains too many links. The reason is that it is a site where I constantly write news and articles and each one of them is a new Joomla item, thus a new link. I actually thought lots of content is good for SEO. How am I supposed to reduce the link amount?
Technical SEO | | polyniki0 -
We're working on a site that is a beer company. Because it is required to have an age verification page, how should we best redirect the bots (useragents) to the actual homepage (thus skipping ahead of the age verification without allowing all browsers)?
This question is about useragents and alcohol sites that have an age verification screen upon landing on the site.
Technical SEO | | OveritMedia0