Hello, a company I work for has their website www.companyname.com, with their index page presenting information and news and the site menu for products etc. Now they want to change so that when you type www.companyname.com you come to an huge picture and like just Welcome to X, click here to proceed. The picture will basically be their latest ad or something that they run in papers. The original first page would be moved to index2.html or something. How would this affect rankings? All the links are basically going to the main page as of now.
yeah it shud be ok..but why do it?de more easier it is to reach the main content the more happier the visitor would be..and make sure the new welcome screen is appealing..if it doesnt look to gud ur visitors will probably close de window right away
It would be affect, because google is so much sensitive now. companyname.com/index.html and companyname.com/index2.html are two different urls in the view of google spiders. If you want to make change you can do but by using a redirect code. There is 303 permanent redirection option to redirect any ulr permanently without any affect on site and its ranking position as well as page rank assignment.
he's changing content,not urls. like what was said,it is fine,but make sure that you have a good meta description.
It can, I always try to link all pages or all main pages to and on the index page, just make sure new index has the Site Map on front page, all that will happen is the index page wont pass on PR juice to the links that were previously on index.