Punished if no real content on frontpage?

by Wieli
4 replies
  • SEO
  • |
Hey there, Im still quite new to IM so forgive my noobiness.

On my frontpage (the xxx.com adress) i don't really have any content. I have built it up so that i have my categories there with pictures etc and i haven't really been thinking about this.

But today i planned to started to build some backlinks and it popped up that how would it be if i aimed my anchortext and "www" to a page with no real content. Will my innerpages suffer from this. Or does it really not matter that my mainpage is not filled with content.

I know that there are alot of pages that don't have content on the first page and they obviously have it working. But would this make my page suffer in any way?
#content #frontpage #punished #real
  • Profile picture of the author Jon Potts
    This is not a very cut and dry answer type of question.

    The short answer is that not having content on your front page will not have a negative effect on search engine rankings.

    However if you are competing for a tough keyword or set of words and you have a long term SEO plan then the content on your front page would be important. Your domain gains pagerank faster than anything since all pages feed back into it and a majority of your backlinks from authority sites will be to it. So it is important to utilize that main page for distributing pagerank juice to important pages.

    There are many more benefits to having the content however it is not necessary for certain forms of SEO.
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  • Profile picture of the author Wieli
    @Jon - Thank you for the input. I'm aiming for an authority site in a subject im really into myself. It's big niche but from what i've seen the competition is "moderate" even for the keyword that describes the whole marker e.g "internet" or "cars" Since in the long run i don't see it impossible to rank for even the main keyword (even if this isn't anything i have targeted in any of my articles so far) i might use a static page instead.

    Once again thanks for the input
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  • Profile picture of the author Bill_Z
    Even e-commerce site owners are now trying to get more content on their homepage. Google's Panda update caused a ton of sites with little content on the homepage to take a hit in rankings. And there is anecdotal evidence that by adding more content to the home page, rankings improve. My advice is to add at least 700-1000 words of content to your homepage.
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael Nguyen
    Google primarily scans text, so any text will only help it. I've seen some site which are pure flash on the surface but underneath the pages has H1 and text, this is known as cloaking. Kinda like what Wikepedia did a few weeks ago where it blanked out the homepage via a javascript redirect. Give Google something to latch on to, H1 and 150 words of text minimum if you can. You'll be amazed what basic fundamental SEO can do to your rankings.
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