Is a 'portal' homepage with many links good for SEO?

[thwart]

What works better - a portal type home page like overstock.com (just imagine this didn't have any nofollows), or a page with 50-75% less links on the homepage. To me it's squandering away the precious homepage PageRank, especially when a Sitemap is already present on the domain.

[tedster]

One of my pet peeves. I don't think it's good for SEO or for visitors. Notice that Amazon backed away from the portal-style home page as they grew. They tried it, measured it and quickly dropped it.

[punisa]

Interesting topic. Could you explain more about what Amazon did? I'm not a regular visitor of theirs so I'm not quite sure what you mean.
It "seems" to look like a portal to me : )
Hardly any content, majority is links. Ofcourse, to their own stuff.

How do you guys classify these things? Thanks : D

[tedster]

When Amazon expanded to 19 departments, all those departments with many sub-choices for each were linked from the home page through a dhtml menu. That's what didn't last.

The issue of trying to show many, many internal pages on the home page is the big issue. Even Yahoo, almost the definition of "portal" has backed off to about 150 links on the home page.

It takes hard work to create a true information architecture istead of going with what I call the "junk drawer" approach, just throwing a link to every page you can think of on the home page. But doing that hard work has a major payoff. It focuses a business in ways that are hard to foresee, but they are essential - a kind of hidden taxonomy.

When that taxonomy is aligned to your target market's mindset, they will be comfortable nivigating the website and the payoff is increased revenue. A second result is much better targeted search traffic from rankikngs that draw in your best prospects, rather than a net that is too wide.

This IA approach also helps you align the site to Google's recommendation of a 100 link limit per page. It's not that Google won't index more links, it's that more links send out all kinds of conflicting signals. Your job is to clear up the noisy signal and put out a clean clear beacon.

[santapaws]

amazon have 450 links on their home page or 240 if your google.

[punisa]

I have a similar situation, I run a news collection site. As the amount of articles keeps growing it's becoming impossible to have a direct or even a two step link to all of the content.

My approach is to use "similar articles" box on many places, these are chosen by random, but so far I like the results.