Modifying Home Page

[palmpal]

Hi All,
I recently modified my home page to include keywords and links to some of my internal pages. Google indexed the page and all the linked pages! I would like to target other internal pages. Can I go and change the home page to reflect this new content or will that mess up my other Google search results? How often should you change the content on your home page? My site has not been deep-crawled yet but Google did find all the pages linked off my home page.

Thanks!

[celgins]

Palmpal... Have you considered setting up a Google Sitemap?

No matter how often you change the content of your homepage, you can notify Google through a sitemap. After a change, simply update the sitemap and resubmit it to Google.

[palmpal]

Hello and thanks. Can I change the home page to reflect new content or will that mess up my current Google search results which are ranking very high?

Thanks!

[lammert]

palmpal,

The amount of PageRank a page can distribute via a link is inversely proportional to the number of links on a page. Every link you add to the homepage will dilute the power of the links to the other pages a little bit.

The amount the other pages will suffer depends heavily on the number of links you want to add. If your current homepage has 15 links and you want to add two or three, you'll probably notice no ranking difference. If the homepage contains only 5 links and you add another 20, that's a totally different story.

It also depends on the number of deep-links to your pages. If there are external pages linking directly to the pages that have good rankings in the SERPs, a big change of the homepage will have no effect on their rankings because of the other links. If only the homepage links to those high ranking pages you should more careful and watch the SERPs in the weeks after the change to see if there were any negative effects.