Randomising Front Page Products

Will it hurt Google rankings?

[Simsi]

Hi all

If I rotate 5 products (randomly) on my front page, is this likely to have a big effect on my Google rankings? My gut feel is yes, because of text descriptions/keyword density, but if I am right, are there any tricks anyone employs/can suggest to circumvent this issue?

Many thanks,

Simsi

[stefano]

hi Simsi,

since i don't believe in "keyword density", i wouldn't look at it as element of evaluation.

but it's pretty hard to me to answer to your question without knowing how many other things there are on your homepage.
i mean, if your 5 random products are *the* homepage, it may hurt. but if you have other things on your homepage, it may help!

however, everytime i have doubts, i forget about search engines and think solely to users. nice part of my answer comes here, because there's no difference with what i said above. if i visit your site, and click on a random product on your homepage, and then i come back to homepage and everything's different, i may get confused. if just a minor part of homepage changed, that would be ok.

[Robert Charlton]

If I rotate 5 products (randomly)...

Are you adding new products, or just taking the existing products on your home page and mixing them up once in a while?

Brick and mortar retail stores like to change their product placement all the time. It's a definite retail marketing strategy... getting customers to have to look through the store, hoping they'll come across something extra they want to buy as they're searching the aisles.

This is not a strategy that I personally like for SEO... I like to give the engines something more stable, at least at the beginning of the home page... but many blogs and news site that do fine may be changing home page content every day.

My guess is that they don't rank much for this onpage content, though, until the articles are archived.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 2:05 am (utc) on April 17, 2007]

[Bewenched]

I certainly hope not. We randomize select items on our category pages ... just to give customers a feel for whats available and maybe give them some gift ideas. We only randomize images with links to the item though. We dont randomize the content.

[Simsi]

Yes well this is the thing. For my customers it makes sense to show them specific products based on their location or what they previously showed interest in. And while everyone is in agreement that you should author for the customer, I don't want to do this and hurt my rankings in the process.

I have a database of x hundred products and want to display 5 on the home page which could differ each time. Sometimes new products, but mostly existing ones.

I do have about 100 words of fixed text at the top of the homepage, but the products each have about 150 word descriptions which forms the bulk of the text.

Keyword density has always been touted as an important factor, but the more I think about it, the less convinced I am as it just doesn't make sense bearing in mind how many sites change their home page content regularly.

Damn. Hard decision.