Orphan My Home Page

[NTGproducts]

I want to orphan a home page on a site that I own so that the start page becomes site.com/home (or whatever) as opposed to site.com/. I need to accomplish this without associating the former with the latter...meaning no 301. Since this will not be a temporary move, 302 does not seem to work either. And even if I could use it, I don't want to credit / with anything from /home. Is there any way to default the Apache handler to /home without rewriting the URL? Or is there any other solution? The bottom line is, at the end of the day, I need Google to forget about / and anything associated with it, without interrupting the user experience when they request /. Thanks in advance.

[gazzerman1]

I was just looking at the same thing for myself yesterday.

I found this thread very interesting and think it might be what you are looking for.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4606464.htm

Basically you 301 to a page that is blocked by robots.txt and that page redirects to your new homepage. So when users come to your homepage they will land on the correct page.

As always be very careful when trying anything like this. Google is unpredictable when it comes to things like this and their robots are getting smarter by the minute.

[NTGproducts]

this thread is helpful. i guess my biggest concern is doing something wrong and having the whole site drop out of index due to something i'm overlooking

[gazzerman1]

Agreed, its a common problem when you are playing in the unknown.

So many people have been hit by link penalties because most link building was done to their homepage. If they are unable to clean up the problem it would be ideal for them have a solution to suggest a new homepage address in Webmaster Tools.

Many would argue that the disavow tool should be the solution to that. I do not think it is having the same effect by nofollowing those links right now.

I will ask John Mueller at Google the question on Friday and see what he comes back with

[NTGproducts]

that would be cool...ive done two rounds of deep disavow and it hasn't lifted a thing. whoever was doing this before really screwed up. big time penguin but only home page.

[gazzerman1]

Do you still have a manual Penalty?

[NTGproducts]

no. just seems like keyword level penguin "penalty" on home page. i came up with something a little different we're going to try. we created a page /home and put the rel canonical there, and we're using a 302 to redirect /home to /. i'm hoping google will index the homepage as  /home while it "temporarily" goes to get the content from /.