Homepage redirect

[FrankSweeney]

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.

[Mike.Goracke]

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

[eyepaq]

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.

[FrankSweeney]

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

[Mike.Goracke]

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