Hi, I have recently been trying to get a lot of backlinks to the main page of my website, and as a result my website has moved up about 10 positions in google in a week's time for the keyword I targeted in the resource box at the bottom of the article I have been submitting to directories etc. My main page is also optimized with the same keyword that is optimized in the article, and in the backlinks. But my main page is kind of long so I am thinking about only having a paragraph on the home page, (as well as the table of conetnts), and then creating a separate page for the remainder of the info on my home page. This way customers won't be overwhelemed by a home page with a lot of writing, but if they want to read more they can click on the link on the bottom which will take them to the main body of the writing. It is that portion of the writing that is actually optimized with my keyword. So my question is will it have a negative effect on my google positioning if I remove the main optimized portion of my home page, and instead give it its own page so my home page is not so cluttered? Or will google just see all the backlinks and base my postioning on that, and also see the link on the bottom of my home page which links to all the writing I just moved to its own page? Thanks in advance, Ed
After I submitted the above question it dawned on me that there are probably several websites out there who have a very brief home page that still ranks high in search results. Google for one only has about 15 links on their home page, and only 1 image, and the search box. That's about it. And yet their page rank is 10. Yahoo has a short home page and they rank 9. Forex has a very breif home page, not a long keyword article about the subject of forex, and they rank 5 and are number 1 in google for the keyword forex. Bodybuilding.com has a super short home page with no keyword targeted article about bodybuilding, and yet they are number 1 in the search results for the keyword bodybuilding, and have a page rank of 5. Ther are probably millions of others who have short home pages with hardly a keyword mentioned, and yet rank high in the search results. So maybe it is the backlinks that count the most in getting your page rank high in the search results. After all google probably has billions of backlinks if you count all the google ads on millions of websites etc. Those with 200,000 or more backlinks seem to be up there with a 7 page rank etc., etc. Any feedback will be great.
The rankings will primarily be determined by your backlinks. If you do move all of that content, try to leave at least 250-300 words. Removing the text could still have a negative effect on your rankings though. Most likely you will temporarily drop in rankings but will gradually go back up. Moving some of the text to internal pages may improve your bounce rate. Some people believe that bounce rates will be used in Google's algorithm soon (if they don't already use it). You should be fine if you do this and keep building more backlinks. Try to also build backlinks to all of those internal pages.
Having a short page can be harder to rank well for then a page full of great content but it also depends on your backlink and strategy to promote the site. For example a short front page with an opt-in and nothing else is going to be harder to rank well that a 100 page blog with a heap of great content in my experience, but is still do-able. But even then, there are ways around that (linking to great content from the opt-in page, etc). What's the reason for wanting a short page? Remember a lot of this is about backlinks, those pages you mention do well because so many people link to them, if your page had as many people linking to it as (say) the Google pages does, then it would rank incredibly well! Cheers Tim
It's a good idea to keep your homepage below 100kb (images not included). If you think it's too long it's a batter idea to optimize the code and improve the code / text ratio instead of removing unique content from the homepage.
Hey, You are confusing PageRank with serp rankings. PageRank has nothing to do with the content of a site, but the content affects your ranking... Does that make sense to you?