Which would you do?

Without going into specifics, I have a situation where I need to choose between two options:

1) Have all of my backlinks point to a subpage, rather than the home page. Will this make my subpage higher ranked than my home page? I want the home page to be the highest ranked.

2) Have all my backlinks point to the home page, but have PHP serve a different version of the page to backlink visitors than to home page visitors. I'm afraid that engines will detect this and penalize for it.

I hope this makes sense. What would you choose?

(good analogy: weather.com - they want their home page ranked highest, but all backlinks go to a weather detail page.)

 

I would NOT go for option 2. You are right, search engines don't really like different versions of the same web page for different visitors. They might consider this as SPAMming and you might be penalised for doing it.

Re option#1, I think Google likes incoming links to internal pages on a website, rather than the home page. IMO, it will also help if most or all of these back-links pointed to different internal pages. Moreover, if you can customise these internal pages for a specific keyword and make sure the BLs are from a related page with the right anchor text, you could do very well.

As far as the PR is considered, I wouldn't worry too much about it at this stage. Since the last coupple of updates, we have had a lot a lot of webmasters (including me) report that their internal pages had a higher PR than the home page. It is quite possible that you might notice similar results, but that should not matter as long as you do well in the SERPs.

 

Most of my backlinks are pointing to my home page. Why shouldn't they point to the home page? Is there a reason?

Thanks

 

IMO Google like links pointing to internal pages. I suppose that increases the importance of your website. Ex: when people link to Yahoo, some people would like to Yahoo Mail, others would link to Yahoo shopping and so on.

I also think that this has to do with how PR is calculated. Your site would effectively suck more PR (IMO) from the site linking to you, if the link is to an internal page.

Finally, it is recommended to optimise every page for a different set of keywords. So, you can either get 100 BLs going to the home page with the anchor text "widgets" or you can get 10BLs to an internal page with the anchor text "blue widgets" with the page optimised for blue widgets; 10BLs to a different internal page with the anchor text "red widgets" with the page optimised for red widgets and so on. This would allow you to match the anchor text of the Bls with the appropriate page.