What to do when your home page an index for a series of pages.

[VelocityWebsites]

I have created an index stack.  My home page is http://www.southernwhitewater.com

The home page is the index itself and the 1st page http://www.southernwhitewater.com/nz-adventure-tours-whitewater-river-rafting-hunting-fishing

My home page (if your look at it through moz bat for chrome bar} incorporates all the pages in the index. Is this Bad?  I would prefer to index each page separately.  As per my site index in the footer

What is the best way to optimize all these pages individually and still have the customers arrive at the top to a picture.  rel= canonical?

Any help would be great!!

http://www.southernwhitewater.com

[MoosaHemani]

Your question is kind of confusing to me but if you are asking about having all internal links on the home page. This is fine. I take a quick look of your website and from the indexing point of view it looks just fine to me!

Although your URLs are very much over optimized it will not take more than a second for one to realize that you are pushing SEO here. I think this is not really a very good idea so my advice is to optimize your URLs and make it SEO friendly instead of inserting your keywords in to it.

If you are asking something different, I would love if you can elaborate your question a bit more.

Hope this helps!

[donford]

Hi Rod,

I will try address the 2 questions I see here.

1. Is an "index stack" bad for your site.
2. How do I optimize my site.

1. Index Stack, okay to be completely honest I have never heard the term before. However, with the link you provided I was able to understand what you mean. In such case you have taken the content of your sub-pages and placed them directly on your home page. Is this bad.. YES!

The reason why this is bad is because it is creating duplicate content. This is bad because the page that should be ranking for X content is now competing with your home page for these rankings. Your home page should be about your business and services, what you do, and how you do it. The sub-pages are your re-enforcement they support the content stated on your homepage.

Imagine a beautiful hotel. The outside is adorned in the finest materials of the time, well maintained and awe inspiring. A equally impressive doorway beacons you to come in. As you do, you find yourself in the lobby. Well placed pristine signs detail some of the hotel's offerings, private gym's, hot tubs, saunas, massage, 5 star dinning, dance halls, and judging by the impressive lobby you have no doubt these offerings will be spectacular.

In this example the lobby is your homepage an impressive list of the offerings guest will find inside. What you don't see is a middle-aged fat man sprawled out in the lobby getting a massage. Which is what your index stack is doing.

2. How to optimize (fix it). To fix this you'll want to structure you home page to be about your business, and services. High level overviews of what you offer, with strong brand placement.

The purpose of the homepage is to make it clear what you do, how you do it, why people love it, and in general more about your brand. The purpose of your inner pages is to completely detail the particular service or products, with call to action to convert interest into money.

I would remove the internal page content from the homepage, and focus again more on an overview. Essentially cut out everything between the Hunting & Gathering Club, and the Call to Action "There's a Southern Whitewater Experience for everyone". Beef up the links to the internal pages by making them look more attractive and obvious.

There are other things that may need addressed as well, but I hope this answers your primary question,

Don

[VelocityWebsites]

Thanks Don

Good answer and I appreciate the detail.  I have been assured that the individual content will not be seen by google as duplicate by the creators, but I am not entirely convinced, and have come to a similar conclusion to you and will be pulling away the home page and making a link across to an index of the services pages.  I have a client who is very particular about the look.  Most will understand the trade-off between plenty of above the fold content, and keeping the opening image clean picturesque and minimalistic.

I will let you know when its finished.  I would like to hear from other people who stack pages in an index as opposed to a drop-down menu or sub-navigation.   This design seems to be quite good for tablets where scrolling is easy and loading pages is slower.  (another trade of between desktops and tablets)

I will be testing a change from one configuration to other to see if the performance improves or not on some of my other sites.  Nothing like an a/b split to put the mind at rest.

[VelocityWebsites]

Thanks Moosa

Yes I have just put this up and went a little OTT on the urls.  I will pull strip them back shortly.

No, the index (index stack) is about the individual pages stacked down a page with no submenu, as opposed to the site index in the footer.   The footer shows how to get to the individual pages by themselves the same way you would in a drop down menu.

[VelocityWebsites]

Hi Don, I have made those changes now.

I still have an index for my home page, but it is; a banner, 2 text pages and a gallery page. If you look at the index though the Moz bar you can see that the H1 & H2 titles have information from the whole index as if it is one long single page.

Rod B

[donford]

HI Rod,

That should have fixed your duplicate content problem.