Hi, Am with a strange problem where am supposed to change the front page article / the homepage frequently...almost on a daily basis. Would this affect my SEO ranking? And If not, is this ok to continue the way am doing right now?
Why would you want to change it everyday? Just curious. If you think about it, most blogs change the front page everytime they post. As long as your article is on topic with the theme of your site, it shouldn't hurt you SEO wise. Personally, I don't see a need to do that if you redesign your home page to include what your site is offering. Listing your services in a column format with bullets would be much better than that annoying blinking thing on top of your page. The search engines would see the text and the need to change your page disappears. BTW, if that is your site, run it through a validator. Bet you have quite a few errors. Also, your keywords need to be separated by commas, not comma-new line. Good luck, Zeek
Some popular blogs with great rankings usually change homepage content everyday. Just make sure you keep the subject of site same, whenever you change articles.
Just about anything you change on a page can affect your rankings although changing the content on any one page generally doesn't have that great of an effect since most pages rank mostly because of the link text used in their inbound links. Changing <title> and <h1> can have noticable affects on a page's rankings, but generally changing that content of the page has miniscule effects. If you feel you must change your home page content regularly, then as the previous poster said, I would make sure that each time you change the content, it remains on topic... although I also agree with the previous poster that it's kind of dumb on a traditional business type site to constantly be changing your home page. If your page ranks well... I would suggest NOT messing w/ it much... Blogs are differrent than traditional web sites. They are meant to change daily. When people say that the search engines like your site to be updated frequently, that doesn't mean you have to change existing pages... The best way to "update your site frequently" is by adding NEW pages... Each new page you add increases the size of your site and gives you an opportunity to rank for a new keyword phrase (since each page on your site should be targetting a single keyword phrase preferably different than the others).
That was great peace of advice. really liked the answer! Actually, this was going to be my next question, you answered it before I asked.
Actually, its for another Joomla website which am not mentioning. The reason why I need to change frontpage often is the frontpage blog layout has an odd background color. So I choose a static page to display in the frontpage & each time I write a new article, I need to set that static page as home page (double work). Thats y I said strange & put the question short. Actually, the answers here are admirable. I really would take lot of your advices.
Personally I have found Google to prefer static homepage titles. Usually when I would change mine, they temporarily drop the ranking. Most often it would come back to a similar ranking shortly after. So if possible I think you should set your site/blog to at least have a static homepage title. If it doesn't have this setting, it is easy enough for a programmer to customize this. The title plays an important role in rankings as it directly tells search engines and visitors the topic of the page. It helps determine what keywords you are relevant for. So a rotating title may cause problems. Then again, many blogs get more traffic to direct posts instead of their homepage.
You might want to consider creating a separate page just for your homepage instead of constantly posting new articles there. That is wasting valuable time. Instead write up a few paragraphs introducing people to that site. Include good navigation elements like links to the top pages/products.