75 replies to this topic

[bwelford]

Perhaps you think a blog cannot work without a Home page, but this morning I suddenly questioned that. I chatted with dazzlindonna (Donna Fontenot) first who thought it might be cool and then with ekstreme (Pierre Far) by trans-Atlantic chat who rapidly came up with a great solution. You can see the solution in detail here.

Basically when you go to the domain, you are instantly 301 redirected to a web page that shows the latest blog entry. That same redirection continues to apply until you add the next post, when the domain is then redirected to the new post. This means that the search engines will assume all the inlinks should be assigned to the current post. More often than not this is the right assignment since it is often the latest post that is of interest to most visitors.

If you look at SERPs for keywords that might be appropriate for your latest post, you may often find that Google shows the Home page first with the individual blog post indented below that. This change should ensure that it is always the blog post itself that ranks highest in the SERPs.

I'm not sure I see any downsides and I believe there are significant upsides. What do you think?

[DonnaFontenot]

The 2 concerns that come to my mind are:

1) Will the bots get confused?

2) Will people get confused? If I'm expecting to see a home page, and I don't, what will I think about that?

Those are my 2 concerns, but there's also one question I have. Is it ONLY the home page link that gets redirected? If I were to link to a post you wrote 3 months ago (a deep link), would the link still go to that post?

[bwelford]

It's early days, Donna, so we will have to see how things pan out.

However on your two questions, I don't think the bots will get confused and links to deep posts seem to be fine from very limited checking I have done.

The best test for me is to do a search for 'Look Mom No Home Page'. Before you would get the Home Page: now you get the post and it's only two hours since I published the post.

[fairclb]

I have a few concerns about this approach, how do search engines treat a permanent redirect? It is my understanding that a 301 indicates to them that this page is no longer valid and to pass all rankings to the page I am redirecting too. If that is the case, one of the articles will eventually be considered the home page and the original home page will removed meaning it provides no SEO benefit. If the latest blog post is always at the same location this might work well, but this method is taking the user to a very specific page.

The other concern is the feeling of disorientation, people like to go to the home page to learn about the author/company and get oriented as to where they are. If you take that ability away you risk confusing your visitors.

Edited by fairclb, 14 April 2010 - 06:04 AM.

[bwelford]

I'm only talking blogs here, fairclb. I've now switched all my blogs to this approach so I'll know quickly if this is creating problems.

In fact visitors to any of the blogs will see no difference in what appears on the rendered page. The blogs always showed only the single latest post and that is unchanged. The only difference, if you spot it, is that the address in the address field is different.

As for the search engines, I believe there are advantages and I will be writing those up as I see them in the next week. However I would love to hear other people's guesses on how the search engines might be affected.

[glyn]

You get nowhere without bending and testing stuff. Let me know how it goes.

My fear is that a 301 redirect could first your old pages getting no found when the system republishes the new post.

IE

Spider goes to domain.com
gets told that the page is actually
domain.com/greatpost.php

Spider goes away.

Spider comes back.

Visits domain.com/greatpost.php (because we told it that domain.com is no longer valid)

doesn't find it because in the meantime you've added a new post which would make the homepage as follows: domain.com/reallygreatpost.php

You miss the indexing because the spider don't go to homepage anymore.

Just thinking aloud.

Can you just set an extract for your homepage snippets.

ps. some engines won't follow the redirect, then what.

Good luck

[bwelford]

Visits domain.com/greatpost.php (because we told it that domain.com is no longer valid)

doesn't find it because in the meantime you've added a new post which would make the homepage as follows: domain.com/reallygreatpost.php

That's not how it works, glyn. domain.com/greatpost.php is the correct long term URL for that post and it will always be there. What we are doing is putting the spot light on that post and calling it the entry point to the domain for a time.

That's not to say there are not lots of questions here. If the back links were pointing to domain.com will it index them against domain.com/greatpost.php. Next time around they will point to a different post so will they be switched.

All I know is that the present system has its drawbacks too. The domain shows up in SERPs when it may no longer be valid for certain keywords that have disappeared either down a long page or off the page entirely. That problem is avoided with this suggested approach.

On your search engines not accepting the 301 redirection, then it would be interpreted as a 302 redirection and there is then no effect on where back links are indexed.

Edited by bwelford, 14 April 2010 - 09:47 AM.

[bwelford]

To illustrate the problem I'm trying to avoid, here below is an image of a SERP that should produce a relevant item for a recent post on this same blog where we now have no home page. Neither of the two SERP entries from the blog are at all relevant to the post I'm searching for.

 serpforstaygolinks.png   28.44K   96 downloads

[jonbey]

A bit fluffy, gut sure I read once that the SE's like to be able to find your index page. May lose trust if not. Dunno though, long time ago, fluffy,.

[eKstreme]

I think this will make a great test. It's a very intriguing idea.

At this stage I'm uncomfortable recommending it for a real website. We'd also need to test 301 vs 302 redirects.

[glyn]

I get you, you are doing something like

directory index post.html

Try it and see, then come back with your findings. I guess you're attempting to push, for want of simplification, PR of the homepage to a new page as a temporary...at least that is one thing that might happen.

[bwelford]

I'm still working through possibilities and watching SERPs and Google Analytics. However a tentative theory is that normally the majority of links come into what is called the home page. Other links come into all the other web pages. I'm not doing anything that will affect the number of links coming in to web pages on the domain. But I do remove the home page. I am therefore assuming that the inlinks will be distributed among the other web pages.

Since PageRank is determined by numbers of inlinks, this should mean that the PageRanks of the other web pages will be higher since they directly get the inlinks rather than having internal links from the home page with its ? 85% discounting factor.

[Michael_Martinez]

From the test blog's explanation:

Part of the reason for this is that the blog Home page has many back links or inlinks pointing to it which causes it to outrank new blog posts which have very few links. This after all is the fundamental principle of the Google search algorithm. The Home page has the highest PageRank and other web pages have lower values. Indeed if they are very recent, they may not even have a value assigned.

Of course, that PageRank is not making as big a difference as this article suggests. The blog home page usually ranks first because it is being recrawled immediately after the ping -- whereas it takes longer for the search engines to crawl and index the individual post pages.

Not all blogs embed their articles in standalone post pages -- search engines have no way of knowing in advance where the blog will share its content, so indexing the home page first makes a lot of sense.

If the blogger allows more than one post to appear on the front page, visitors can read more than one article. This, of course, screws up your analytics data because it looks like you get high bounce rates -- but none of the analytics software can accurately measure time-on-site or true bounces anyway.

I honestly don't see the value in doing this. The individual articles will be crawled and indexed and the blog should build brand value through its home page. If you're constantly redirecting visitors to the most recent blog post I doubt you'll build much brand value. You're discouraging natural visitor curiosity by making them work for more content.

Negatively impacting the user experience that is (in my guess) not going to benefit a blog over the long term.

[A.N.Onym]

If you have a blog homepage and publish full posts on it, then by redirecting the homepage to a single post you reduce the amount of long tail traffic. And I'm a fan of a page with lots of links and content (a blog homepage, for example).

The only potential benefit I see is that if your post is the best link magnet on your site, then you make it slightly easier to link to your post. However, it doesn't seem to be a huge problem.

[glyn]

Let's wait and see. This thread has a lot of ideas in it, and like Alberto the frog who's going to guess the right answer (Milkshake flavour)
http://www.youtube.c...h?v=wHcl8fsRhRM

[bwelford]

In case we lose too many people with Alberto the Frog (6 1/2 minutes of ... - one unkind comment said it was booooring - probably guessed the milkshake flavour wrong), I should say that I am seeing some very intriguing indications in SERPs that this is doing something very useful. However you do lose the toolbar page rank indicator for the domain, since you can no longer see 'the domain'. If anyone has thoughts on how to still find the PageRank for the domain, that would be intriguing. Clearly this is not for the faint of heart, particularly if your toolbar PageRank is important to you. I will be writing some findings up after a few more days of testing.

Of course the real question is how will this play out in long term indexing with Google. My guess is that if it looks good immediately, then it probably won't go sour over a longer period since there is nothing here that goes against the Guidelines. However who knows.

[A.N.Onym]

I wonder if an ecommerce shop with few products can afford to redirect to a single product, while having the homepage at /home or something. But this seems unconventional enough to confuse visitors.

Anyway, while redirecting the page may seem weird, I did try optimizing a homepage for just one keyword theme (twice) of the whole website (which seems to be a middle ground between redirecting and not acutely optimizing a homepage) and it did help somewhat (but not substantially). However, what's missing from the recipe is the amount of links *to the homepage* with related anchor text. So unless you are writing about a topic that's related to your homepage anchor text history, it'll be hard to see a good shift in rankings, it would seem.

Then again, it *is* an interesting experiment, so let's, indeed, wait and see

Edited by A.N.Onym, 16 April 2010 - 05:00 AM.

[bwelford]

Just as a quick update, I think this approach is probably useful for all blogs. It seems to work very well for my style of blog writing. I usually write a pretty substantive blog post at least once a week. My old home page showed only the latest post so it looks very little different.

In some ways it's more user friendly. Before you would have to click on the title to move to the single post, which had the link at the top to the previous post. Now that appears on the first page you see.

I'm very intrigued at what I'm seeing in the SERPs and will shortly report on that. For quick reference, I'm calling it the LMNHP approach, not to be confused with the Lucknow Muzaffarpur National Highway Project.

[A.N.Onym]

I guess each of us has different blog homepages. Mine is/was a list of 10 posts under some 500 characters, while some have 5-10 full blog posts.

Edited by A.N.Onym, 16 April 2010 - 05:26 PM.

[bwelford]

You may find the following update of interest. This approach is now being applied to 4 blogs and all 4 are #1 for the titles of their latest post. Cutting back on the words in the searches, the four still come up as #1 in my (personalized) searches for the following phrases. In some cases, there is a good deal of competition for similar phrases. Your mileage may vary so you may wish to check them out yourself:

• BPWrap - Google search for Higher Rankings Without (70.4 million searches)
• OtherBB - Google search for Earth Day Langley (106,000 searches)
• Senior Money Memos - Google search for Senior Label (27.0 million searches)
• Staygolinks - Google search for Look Mom No Home (23.4 million searches)

Some of these searches are not very likely to be done by humans, but they do illustrate how Google is seeing these blogs. I'll be checking these out on a regular basis and will try to leave one or two unchanged for a week or two. The questions I'm asking myself are:
a ) Will these results persist or will they suddenly change?
b ) Will these posts be equally visible once the next post comes in and takes their place as the 'front page' of the blog?

If you want to check out more of my thinking, then the BPWrap post on Higher Search Engine Rankings Without A Home Page, the #1 in the first search above, does give more. As usual, your thoughts on any aspect of this would be most helpful.

Edited by bwelford, 18 April 2010 - 10:12 AM.