Order by random

Does it upset SERP's if its a moving target

[wheelie34]

Just been asked to look at a site that's having some optimisation done by the owner.

The first thing I noticed was the lists of "widgets" is displaying ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 5 from their database.

Her reason is, so no item stays at the top spot, I can understand that, but is it safe as far as search engines go? the pages seem to do OK after looking at the stats (Urchin, not G's version) sites home page has a PR5 and the pages in question have a 4.

[ogletree]

I would nofollow those links. What is going to happen is that you will randomly have a link from your home page to those pages. This will make it hard to judge how your SEO is doing. Your rankings would move around a lot. One day you would rank well for one term then in a few days or weeks you would fall on that and then rank for another term. This would be a good idea if you have a lot of new pages not in the index. I would not do this permanently. Your linking structure should be static. This way you can plan it out. Internal linking is important.

[wheelie34]

Thanks ogletree, I had a feeling it would cause some sort of ranking problem, when checking her stats I noticed the variations between those pages and their "list all from category" index type pages they were up for a few weeks, traffic wise, in their honeymoon period but since, over 14 months, haven't featured as highly, only having about 3 peak periods since.

She only wants to show a selection so I think you're right, nofollow will be best, thanks again.