Deep linking from home page via random post carousel... help or hurt?

[ichthyous]

I recently added a random post carousel to my Wordpress site's homepage. I wanted to encourage deep linking to some of my interior posts as they have no inbound links from the homepage. I added a carousel of 12 random posts pulled from about 480 posts in total. The 12 posts shown are randomized and update on every page refresh. These posts are all indexed fine and exist about 2 levels deep, but I was hoping that a direct link from the homepage might boost them a bit.

After about 4 weeks I checked in Google Search Console I am finding that very few of the 480 posts are actually showing a link from the homepage at all. I am wondering if including title text for 12 random posts on my home page has watered down my home page's text with unrelated terms and may actually be hurting me. Has anyone actually tried using one of these random post carousels on their home page and what was the result? Thanks for any advice!

[keyplyr]

Sounds like a novel idea.

I was hoping that a direct link from the homepage might boost them a bit.

Not without relevant content on both ends. If the target article is unrelated to the link source page content, I would not expect any "boost." Besides, insite linking offers very little "boost" anyway. It's more of a user experience thing.

[ichthyous]

Thanks Keyplyr, the entire site is about the same subject, so the posts can definitely be seen as thematically related. The home page is about photography, while the posts are each individual photo pages. From what I have read, if most of your inbound links are to your homepage (as mine are), then linking from the home page directly to interior pages signals that the content page is important. If linking from the home page doesn't actually help to drive up interior pages then I might remove it entirely. While visitors do use the links to visit the content, the thumbnail images for 12 random posts also slows the homepage load time down a bit.

[rainborick]

The problem I see is that the links from your carousel are temporary. At the simplest level, any ranking benefit to the target pages would only last until Google re-crawls your home page and sees a new set of links. And since the home page is "changing" with every new crawl, you'll be encouraging Google to re-crawl the page more often, which only compounds the issue. The only benefit I would expect is that some of the target pages would get crawled/indexed a bit sooner than they might in the normal course of things.

[ichthyous]

@rainborick - I was wondering how Google might handle short term links like this. Thus far it has seemed to disregard them mostly. It's very hard to get quality inbound links to lower level pages that aren't really in depth content, they are more skin to product pages. The only real direct links are from social media sites and a few online portfolio sites. Luckily it's the same situation with my competitors. I was hoping to be able to get those pages ranked higher but if the carousel isn't really going to boost them long term then it's not worth the extra load time on the home page.