SEO Lessons on your Domain and Homepage

An audit of websites from the music industry revealed an appalling result. Almost 30% of these sites or sixteen sites forward people from their own domain to their homepage with the use of temporary redirect. Suffice it to say that these sites are throwing away authority.

If you happen to be unfortunate enough to have a different homepage and domain, it is imperative that you determine how the domains forward your visitors to your actual homepage.  There is only one correct way of forwarding visitors to your homepage and that is by a 301 permanent redirect.

What does a permanent redirect do? It tells search engines to take the authority from off-site links, point it to your domain and apply it to your real homepage. One of the most used inaccurate ways of forwarding your domain to your homepage is via a 302 temporary redirect. What does a temporary redirect do? It tells search engines to not forward any authority from your link. It makes all your efforts go in vain.

Be in the know

Writers, bloggers and producers of online content want one thing and that is to link to their brands.  When they do not link to a specific content, they often link to the root domain. It is in everyone’s best interest to make good use of the search engine ranking authority which off-site links send your way.

For example, if your website forwards visitors to the correct country versions and language of your website based on their location, then it is a very good thing. The only other thing which you need to do is configure every other little thing so that it will not block incoming links.

How can you make automation work for you? You need to treat search engines and people in the same way.  You must already know by now that search engines do not store cookies and this is why you should treat search engines exactly the same way you treat visitors who have disabled cookies. You must also not forget to stay within the terms of service of the search engine.

Best practices

There may be a lot of changes today but you should not let yourself get confused by them. There are basic practices which you can do to ensure that you do not commit violations. You should use the 301 redirect for all versions of your domain to the master homepage.

Never redirect all links to the www version of your root domain only to redirect them to your master homepage after. Each time you use a 301 redirect, there is a little link authority lost and this is something which you do not want to happen. You need to keep intact as much authority as you possibly can so you must always ensure that there is one redirect hop and that is a 301 redirect. After four or five hops, the search engines will stop following redirects.

How do you locate redirects on your website? You can do so by running your own crawl. There are various tools on the internet which you can use for this purpose.