Keyword Based Redirection?

[consultant1027]

Say you have a website for a department store that sells Shoes, Pants, and Shirts. Say your top ranking on Google when searching for each of those keywords points to your home page.

Is it against Google's rules to read the keyword used from the REFERER (q=keyword in the case of Google) and redirect the user to the category home page for the corresponding department?

The Google Spider will of course not be redirected since it isn't passing a keyword when it crawls.

[dburk]

Hi consultant1027,

The fact that your homepage outranks the inner pages, that are more relevant, is an indication of a flawed SEO strategy. If you had been doing proper SEO all along you wouldn't have that issue. With proper internal link structure and a little bit of deep linking you would never have this issue in the first place. Google is very good at knowing which page is the most relevant, it takes a good deal of misdirection to get Google to index the wrong page in the first place.

I wouldn't recommend a dynamic redirect as it ignores the fundamental underlying cause of the problem and has the potential to trigger a penalty. If you had ever read Google's Webmaster Guidelines you would already be aware of this specific policy:
Cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects, and doorway pages - Webmaster Tools Help

SEO, when properly done, is all about getting the search engines to index each individual page of your website for the keyword(s) that is most relevant to that particular page. If they are ranking the wrong page, then you screwed up because search engines are very good at getting it right with minimal effort on your part.

[SyndicatedViews]

It appears that your ranking campaigns were done with all the keywords pointing to your home url. While this is good in some cases, it's not for yours. I wouldn't recommend performing any redirects. Redirects are not taken too well by Google. So don't do it. Especially with it being a main website of yours.

Well it's done. Google thinks that your homepage is more relevant than your internal categories.

My advice;

1. Continue building anchor based links to your inner pages. Stop doing them for the home page. The silver lining is that YOUR RANKING!!
2. Get some attractive call to action on your home page to the inner pages. You don't want them to leave the site because they perceive it as irrelevant!
3. Add a compelling video on the home page. Then encourage them to browse the catalog of items. You can find great video content creators on this forum. The key is to keep the traffic on page and then to send them to where you want. Your situation isn't hopeless. You just need some better way of converting the traffic by giving them what they searched for.