Having a second homepage for a site would affect my SEO?

[Robertnweil1]

Hello guys,

One of our clients is planning to have a new landing page for any users hitting the site for the first time. (returning users will still see the current homepage based on cookies ... in other words, the site would technically have 2 home pages). According to this client, they are planning to do something like this:

• https://www.websitename.com/ (for returning visitors)
• https://www.websitename.com/newuser (for first time visitors)

Our instinct is that is not great to have 2 home pages (that would affect the SEO campaign we are managing for this company) and we are not sure how to handle this. That's why we would appreciate your opinion regarding this topic:

• From an SEO perspective, do you think this is a good idea?
• If not, what would you guys do differentiate first-time visitors vs returning visitors without affecting SEO? Maybe just a pop-up?

Thanks in advance for your help !

[Angelos_Savvaidis]

Hey Robert,

In my point of view that sounds like a landing page which as far as i know is perfect.

It actually helps visitors don't fall with there faces to many information that they don't need to know and confuse them.

Check out this article on Moz which is kinda old but for me still correct.

http://moz.com/blog/landing-pages-for-seo

Hope that helps.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Here's my take:

First, basing user experience on cookies isn't always the best experience. Folks change browsers throughout the day (phone, tablet, laptop, desktop) and they often browse privately and/or clear their cookies. This means LOTS of folks will be landing on the "first-time" page when they are actually returning visitors.

But if you can live with this, fine.

From an SEO point of view, where are you directing bots like Googlebot that don't accept cookies? Will bots see the "new visitor" page? Do you want bots to see the new visitor page?  (sorry for so many questions, but I don't know your objectives - but these are important questions to think about)

Overall, it's typically best to have a consistent experience between bots and visitors. If this means javascript popup for folks without a cookie set, this might be the best option (but still not ideal, because popups can negatively effect visitor usage and satisfaction metrics, like bounce rate)

If this is something you have to do, I'd go with the popup, but first I'd try to talk the client out of it