Is Your Home Page Exactly That?

It is very common for websites to have a sitewide link (a link on every page) pointing back to the home page. If for no other reason, it gives your sites users an easy navigational route back to the (presumably) starting point of your site. More often that not users expect to easily find a link back to the home page.

But just what is your home page? Is it the same as your domain name or is it something like www.mysite.com/default or www.mysite.com/index.htm? Whilst the content and therefore visual appearance is no different you are creating a mixed message if your home page isn’t just your domain name.

By not pointing back to your domain name you are making the search engines decide for themselves what your homepage is and this could be detrimental to your search rankings, possibly causing duplicate content issues. So wherever possible, always refer to your homepage as www.mysite.com when you link your pages yourself and when other people link to your home page.

Vanessa Fox (ex google) shares the same advice over in a recent blog post where she says:

But the home page? I think that’s better off resolving to the domain, in this case, www.jonestshirts.com. As before, if you do have other URLs for your home page, you should 301 redirect everything to one URL, and for the home page, I would keep things simple and do all of that resolving back to the domain. Make sure all internal links are to that one URL and encourage external linking to do the same.

One additional issue to consider is the use of www. To avoid what the search engines call canonical issues you should ensure that (if you can) you configure your website so that www.mysite.com and just mysite.com (without the www.) are one and the same . You can simply tell google whether your site uses the www prefix or not within their webmaster central services.