Should You Redirect Traffic To Your New Home Page?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 18 of April , 2008 at 12:25 pm

When you move your website to a new domain and set up a 301 redirect to send your old traffic to that new domain, do yourself a favor and don’t redirect all of your traffic to your new home page. That will definitely create a bad user experience. This is just one of the tips that the Google Webmaster Blog suggests and I rather like the complete list.

Redirecting each page to a like page on your new site, however, is essential for a number of reasons. The first, and probably best, reason is because you will likely lose traffic. Let’s say that your website has 100 pages on it. You have a tiered structure where 10 of your pages extend from your home page and each of those Tier 2 pages have several pages extending from them (call it Tier 3). If you redirect all of your Tier 3 pages to your home page then your users who expected to find detailed information on a specific topic within your niche will be disappointed when they land on your home page and find general information about your niche that isn’t going to help them. Now they have to try to find the information on your website by navigating from page to page.

It is likely that your visitors are finding your through searches at one of the search engines based on a keyword that they entered into a search box. Even if they clicked a link from another website, a social media site, or a blog, they were looking for specific information when they clicked the link. That information won’t be on the first page of your website and your users may not know that they are being redirected to a new site so will just think that your navigation system is broken. If that is the case then you will create a bad experience for them that could cause them to never come back.

Category: SEO

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