Homepage redirect
-
I'd like to get some thoughts about redirecting your homepage URL (www.site.com) to a keyword rich URL (www.site.com/super-awesome-best-thing-ever).
Thank you, in advance.
-
I pick up what you are putting down... thanks for the clarification Frank.
Here is how I think things would play out...
If you are creating /super-awesome-best-thing-ever as a new page that does not exist yet on your site, it will have very little rank. It if you redirect site.com to site.com/super-awesome-best-thing-ever you will have a partial drop in page rank due to the 301 redirect. Just because you are redirecting your homepage to the /super-awesome-bet-thing-ever does not mean it will get the full power of your old homepage, site.com. You would also need to change all of your internal links to point to site.com/super-awesome-best-thing-ever instead of site.com, because you'd lose some of your link juice flow if you also used the redirect internally.
And if you use a 301 redirect, you are telling Google that this change is permanent - inferring that you are no longer going to use your domain of site.com. Does that mean Google would remove the URL site.com from the index... I don't know.
I do know that SEOmoz places keyword usage in the URL under the "moderately important" section of its on page analysis - that said, I wouldn't go to trouble of this. I think you are better off optimizing your homepage for the keyword or creating a /super-awesome-best-thing-ever landing page.
Hope this helps.
Mike
-
Mike,
Its not that I'm looking for a way around optimizing the on-page content, but more looking to add the URL as a keyword rich element.
Your homepage is typically your highest ranking page, so my question, which I should have been more specific about, is in regards to the possible drop in pagerank, due to the redirect. Do you think that the benefits of the keyword rich URL would offset the drop in pagerank?
Thanks
Frank
-
Hi,
It works very well short term. If you have the target page in a "home page" type of look and feel you won't have any issues with UX either.
I've seen this done but there are a few things that needs to "happen" in order to get the best out of it:
-
have high authority on the www.site.com
-
the target page is a new page that needs an initial boost
-
the target page has the home page look and feel type of approach (navigation, options etc)
-
you need to have the ability to roll back when needed
Also like Mike mentioned there are a few other very viabile options:
-
optimize the home page for the keyword (my favorite - unless everything is straight forward and there is no risk for filters and penalties - especially the ones that are related with another text / links)
-
feature the new page on the home page very well - for both sending out PR and CTR (so once someone will land on the home page, your CTR will be high for this page)
Hope it helps.
-
-
I personally think this may confuse users. For instance, if they click on your company logo from another page and are directed to www.site.com/super-awesome-best-thing-ever stead of www.site.com... that might appear kind of strange to them.
Why don't you either:
-
optimize your homepage for super-awesome-best-thing-ever
-
create a landing page for super-awesome-best-thing-ever
If you are trying really hard to rank for super-awesome-best-thing-ever, I would try the above 2 options first. If you still aren't getting the results you want, then maybe try the homepage redirect; however, I think that is somewhat odd functionality for the user.
In most cases, the super-awesome-best-thing-ever is going to be more specific. For instance, if bestbuy.com redirected to bestbuy.com/electronics-retailer that would confuse me... A LOT.
Have you tried other options first?
Mike
-
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
-
Inbound Links - Redirect, Leave Alone, etc
Hi, I recently download the inbound links report for my client to look for some opportunities. When they switched to our platform a couple years ago, the format of some of their webpages change, so a number of these inbound links are going to an error page and should be redirected. However, some of these are spammy. In that case, someone recommended to me to disavow them but still redirect anyway. In other cases, some were "last seen" a year or two ago, so when I try to go to the URL the link is coming from, I also get an error page. Should I bother to redirect in these cases? Should I disavow in both cases? Or leave them alone? Thanks for any input!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AliMac261 -
.com geotagging redirect to subdomains - will it affect SEO?
Hi guys, We have a .com domain and we've got geoIP on it, so UK goes to .co.uk and USA goes to .com/us We're just migrating over to another platform so we're thinking of keeping a "dummy" server just to do this geoIP pointing for us. Essentially .com will just point over to the right place and hold a specific .com/abc (which is generic for everyone worldwide) Current Scenario:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Infruition
.com (Magento + geoIP)
.com/us (US Magento)
.co.uk (UK - geoIP redirect to Shopify)
.com/abc (sits on Magento server) Wanted Scenario:
.com - used for GEOIP and a specific .com/abc (for all users)
.co.uk (UK) - Shopify eCom
.com/us -> migration to us.xx.com (USA) - Shopify eCom I just wanted to know if this will affect our rankings on google? Also, any advice as to the best practises here would be great. Thanks! Nitesh0 -
Magento Temporary Redirects?
Just checked my Crawl insights. I have 1981 on Moz 302 redirects - temp I'm not too familiar with Magento - however site domain has moved from .com to .co and although I have set a 301 redirect on the base domain through hta I am assuming it is also temporary redirecting things in the CMS itself? The temporary directs that the site is creating are still on the new domain - but are really odd! Eg Wishlist, Product compare links .co/wishlist/index/add/product/498/form_key/5e7CQkZ54tMSsJtwAnyone have ideas in regards to this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kelly33301 -
IT want to do a name server redirect
Hi, I am in a little bit of a pickle, and hope that you clever people can help me... A little background: In April this year we relaunched one of our brands as a standalone business. I set up page to page 301 redirects from the old website to the new branded domain. From an SEO perspective this relaunch went amazingly smoothly - we only lost around 10% of traffic and that was just for a couple of months. We now get more traffic than ever before. Basically it's all going swimmingly. I noticed yesterday that the SSL certificate on the old domain has expired, so I asked IT to repurchase one for us to maintain the 301 redirects. IT are saying that they would prefer to do a name server redirect instead, which would remove all the page to page 301s. They are saying that this would maintain the SEO. As far as I am aware this wouldn't. Please can someone help me put together a polite but firm response to basically say no? Thanks, I really welcome and appreciate your help on this! Amelia
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CommT0 -
Site De-Indexed except for Homepage
Hi Mozzers,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | emerald
Our site has suddenly been de-indexed from Google and we don't know why. All pages are de-indexed in Google Webmaster Tools (except for the homepage and sitemap), starting after 7 September: Please see screenshot attached to show this: 7 Sept 2014 - 76 pages indexed in Google Webmaster Tools 28 Sept until current - 3-4 pages indexed in Google Webmaster Tools including homepage and sitemaps. Site is: (removed) As a result all rankings for child pages have also disappeared in Moz Pro Rankings Tracker. Only homepage is still indexed and ranking. It seems like a technical issue blocking the site. I checked for robots.txt, noindex, nofollow, canonical and site crawl for any 404 errors but can't find anything. The site is online and accessible. No warnings or errors appear in Google Webmaster Tools. Some recent issues were that we moved from Shared to Dedicated Server around 7 Sept (using same host and location). Prior to the move our preferred domain was www.domain.com WITH www. However during the move, they set our domain as domain.tld WITHOUT the www. Running a site:domain.tld vs site:www.domain.tld command now finds pages indexed under non-www version, but no longer as www. version. Could this be a cause of de-indexing? Yesterday we had our host reset the domain to use www. again and we resubmitted our sitemap, but there is no change yet to the indexing. What else could be wrong? Any suggestions appeciated. Thanks. hDmSHN9.gif0 -
Failed microsites that negatively affect main site: should I just redirect them all?
While they are great domain names, I suspect my 7 microsites are considered spammy and resulted in a filter on my main e-commerce site for the important keywords we now have a filter blocking from showing up in search. Should I consider it a sunk cost and redirect them all to my main e-commerce site, or is there any reason why that would make things worse? I've fixed just about everything I can thinking of in response to Panda and Penguin, before which we were on the first page for everything. That includes adding hundreds of pages of unique and relevant content, in the form of buyers guides and on e-commerce category pages -- resolving issues of thin content. Then I hid URL parameters in Ajax, sped up the site significantly, started generating new links... nothing... I have tons of new keywords for other categories, but I still clearly have that filter on those few important head keywords. The anchor text on the microsites leading to the main site are typically not exact match, so I don't think that's the issue. It has to be that the sites themselves are considered spammy. My bosses are not going to like the idea because they paid for those awesome domains, but would the best idea be to redirect them to the e-commerce site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ElBo9130 -
If I redirect a penalized domain to a non-penalized domain, will the new domain still be penalized?
If I redirect a penalized domain to a non-penalized domain, will the new domain still be penalized?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MangoMan160 -
Opportunity for Redirect?
Hi there! I've got a site selling outdoor jackets and remembered about a friend's old business website (that also sold outdoor jackets) which is now dormant. He's kindly agreed to let me host a splash page on his old domain, or to use the domain to redirect. I wasn't sure if Google looked negatively at redirects, so I suggested the page host option? What do you think? I guess what it would mean is for us to supply our name server details to him, and then ask him to put these into his DNS settings. If we were to host a page in this way, would we add a page of relevant content, a simple link? Would this pull the link juice through? Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Matt
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Macinasac0