Transitioning to a dynamic home page. Impact on SEO?

[JasonBilog]

Home page redesign advice, please.  We're a growing college textbook publishing company; a unique one in that we publish everything under an open license.  Our homepage www.flatworldknowledge.com has a solid page score (80), and since our product serves several different customers/audiences -- students, faculty, bookstores -- we're transitioning to a dynamic home page approach.  Returning instructors will be served a personalized faculty page, returning students a student oriented page featuring the books they've most recently accessed, and first time/anon visitors will receive a more neutral welcome page until we know more about them.

Pros, cons with this change to a dynamic homepage?

What should we be thinking about/concerned about from an SEO perspective?

How do you address title tags?

Will this approach dilute page authority?

Thanks all!

[GeorgeAndrews]

Hi Michelle,

Hopefully others will chime in on whether or not you need to worry about diluting page authority (I am not as familiar with how authority is determined and do not have an answer for you).

I do have a couple questions about how you will identify return visitors. Will you be using a cookie residing on their computer to identify them? Will they need to log in?

Perhaps a structure in which you your neutral home page is at the root and you provide a different URL to serve up content for for users that are logged in/accept cookies/or however else you will be identifying them:

www.flatworldknowledge.com - neutral home page

www.flatworldknowledge.com/students - content for returning students

www.flatworldknowledge.com/faculty - content for returning instructors

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but SEOmoz uses a similar method for PRO members. If you are logged in as a PRO member and type www.seomoz.org into the address bar and hit enter, you are sent to your PRO Dashboard page: http://www.seomoz.org/users/pro. Your site could work similarly for students and instructors. Using this type of method would address your issue with title tags and you may have an easier time producing the dynamic content from a technical standpoint as well.

Anyways, hope this helps!

[JasonBilog]

Thank you, George!  Yes, our registered users are cookied so we can serve up pages based on their individual preferences.  Has anyone else changed their homepage in that way - to a more personalized experience --love other insights on what we should be thinking about from an SEO perspective.