What happens if we remove all the links to internal pages from our homepage?

[vtmoz]

Hi Moz community,

We wanna give a try by removing all the links from homepage to internal pages and keep just a free trial button. Will this impact our SEO anyway? We have nearly 15 important internal pages at 2nd and 3rd hierarchy level. They may drop in rankings but we want to risk for few days to understand how it works. Your opinion please!

Thanks

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hey vtmoz,

I am a firm proponent of experimentation and risk taking!! I say go with it, worst case you can rule it out and revert it back. This seems like a no-brainer experiment Hope this helps (or motivates) Cheers!

"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." - Albert Einstein

[Vijay-Gaur]

Although I could agree with Bryan Loconto to take a risk, yet it looks like a huge risk as your website structure might not be very well validated by the search engine bots. Also, it might take time to revert the ranks once lost.

PS: I am not just being conservation but a little cautious.

[dhananjay.kumar1]

Definitely this will impact your SEO negatively. You could loose ranking but still if you want to take this risk. Just go for it.

[vtmoz]

Hi Vijay Gaur and dhananjay.kumar1,

Thanks for the response. You mentioned that we may loos ranking. Do you mean homepage ranking or internal pages ranking?

[Vijay-Gaur]

You might be risking both.

[dhananjay.kumar1]

Major impact will be on Internal Pages as they will loose all the distributed page authority and ranking power from the home page that is creature of all pages. Definitely along with Internal pages Home page will have a diverse impact as these linking defines the architecture and hierarchy of a website. If you are destroying the architecture it will have negative impact unless you are not a search engine (search engine have a plain structure like this you are trying)

[Chris.Menke]

Rather than go through that, could you try something like a lightbox popup thingy? (I'm not a designer and don't know the real names for them)

[Bryan_Loconto]

Great point Chris, this is definitely worth looking into! A "lightbox pop up thingy" may give you what you want from a functionality standpoint, without having to kill those links.

Also, I do believe "lightbox pop up thingy" is the technical term. I've heard others refer to them as a "modal window" or something silly like that =P