Hello, I have about 18,000 products on my site to work with and want to randomize 15 links on the home page to 15 product pages. I'd like our visitors to see different products everytime they come to our site. What I am asking... Would randomizing links hurt any scoring with google or possibly help? I would think it helps considering it keeps the homepage constantly active and allows the bot to hit buried products. Any thoughts?
It wouldn't hurt or help any really. Google will index all the links either way, and whatever links/keywords happen to be the 15 to show up randomly when Google crawls your site will also be indexed as part of your home page.
It won't hurt but won't help either. However it's a good idea to do so. Your clients will appreciate it, I'm sure.
Google won't mind, but I'd suggest nofollowing those links. You want to be able to control how link juice flows through your site, and doing it this way gives you no clue of which products will get more love from Google that day. By nofollowing those links, you can control how the link juice flows down to them.
If anything it would cause the googlebot to show up more often and think hey this guys updating his page alot lets give him more trust, I'm not totally sure about this but who knows.
It depends on how the randomizing is being done. Via javascript? It won't be crawled. I've used a product scroller on my ecommerce site and I did notice that it was finding the deeper products if the spider crawled at the right time.