Moving our current homepage to a new URL

[JoeLin]

Our homepage currently speaks to a specific product and we're re-doing our homepage to be more about the brand which links to the product. The current home page has PA of 62 with thousands of links to the page. Question is are there any best practices around this or any risks?

So current page is:

www.xyz.com which we will be refreshing then moving the existing content

to

www.xyz.com/product so all the subdirectories gets shifted over 1

Thank in advance for the help!

[danatanseo]

Are you planning on achieving this via a Meta Refresh? (I thought I'd better ask first before officially shouting "Danger, Danger Will Robinson!")

[JoeLin]

Good question. From my understanding, there's no move in a sense of using redirects e.g. Meta Refresh. We're refreshing the existing domain page with new content, and what is now on www.xyz.com just will now be on www.xyz.com/product.

There was a mistake in my initial question, the sub-pages will not get shifted, there is only one page that is affected which is the current page on the domain. This is the case because those pages were already nested within www.xyz.com/product beforehand.

[JaredMumford]

Definitely to reiterate Dana, need more info about the specifics because yes there could be disastrous effects if not done properly.

Besides meta refresh, there are other things to consider. Probably most importantly is the positioning of the home page in search results for the 'product'. If you are ranking top 5 for your product keywords, and the ranking page is your home page, you may find that when you rework your home page to reflect your brand, you lose that positioning.

If you were moving from one landing page to another (i.e. /products to say /products/buy, it would be a bit different because you could 301 the /products page and officially tell Google and other SEs that you are simply moving the page. You cannot, obviously, do this with the root domain (301) or that would defeat the branding purpose.

I would definitely check positioning and revenue for your money keywords first. Also, once you move the product, i would at the very least have a link in the main navigation of the home page that links directly to the product with the appropriate anchor. If you only have one product, or one product set, i would also encourage you to optimized the URL (i.e. instead of /product it could be /

Still need more info to make solid recommendations.

[irvingw]

If you have one main product then make the homepage target both your brand name (as primary target) and your product as the secondary target.

<title>My Brand Name | My Main Product</title>

especially if you are already getting traffic to the homepage for your product.

[danatanseo]

I am in 100% agreement with Jared. I especially agree with his suggestion to have some kind of obvious, prominent link from the home page to this main product. Be prepared to ride out a dip in rankings, traffic etc. It might not be a bad idea to read Seth Godin's book The Dip as you go through this process

[JoeLin]

So right now, we have www.pokki.com that is really our app store that we're using as our home page (nm the bad title tags / metadata etc that we will be addressing as well). We then have a page that is "What Is" pokki page that is written more in the tone of what our new homepage is going to be. The existing home page doesn't give users an idea of what the product does so we want to change it so that our home page will be more contextual and it will then link to the app store page from there (instead of vice versa today).

What we will do is redo the content that is currently on the What Is page, which we will then 301 redirect  to www.pokki.com, then move the content that is currently on the homepage to www.pokki.com/apps.

From a keyword search perspective, the new home page should actually strengthen our positioning as there will be a lot more text/content that speaks specifically to the product.

Hope this clarification helps. I'm thinking there shouldn't be a prob, but just wanted to make sure.