Ranking For Your Homepage And Crawl Rate Question

[Sebastien]

Folks -

It seems to me that Google places more emphasis on a search result when it comes up as homepage rather than a random post or page.

Can anyone confirm this ? It seems like common sense. Personally, I've had good results ranking for my homepage. The compromise is the range of keywords that you rank for is typically narrow.

Having said this, I notice that my homepage typically get crawled less frequently than individual posts. I am even using the Wordpress sitemap plugin and have set the homepage crawl priority to 1. But still, Google will index my posts in like 20 minutes and take up to 1 week or more for the homepage.

I don't like this for two reasons:

1/ I don't want Google to think that my homepage content is stale.

2/ My link profile can increase dramatically if my homepage is only crawled every 10 days. I don't want Google to be like : WTF ? 345 new links ? Take this penalty buddy => Do you feel it ?

My questions are:

1/ How do make your homepage content dynamic and get the spiders coming back ?

2/ What are your experiences in ranking for your homepage ? Do you have any tips for me ?

I am Looking for some SEO ballas to advise me.

Many Thanks,

-- Sebastien

PS: also willing to pay for advanced SEO information.

[GCPguy]

I notice that my homepage typically get crawled less frequently than individual posts.

Do you notice this from server logs, or from Google cache?

I'm almost sure that if you check your server logs, you'll see the spiders visiting your homepage daily. With newer sites (under a couple of years old - or possibly a certain pagerank) Google might crawl your homepage daily (even every few hours), but not show the updated Title, Description, or Cache, for a week or so. It's frustrating, but just part of the game.

1/ I don't want Google to think that my homepage content is stale.

It doesn't - just keep adding regular content.

2/ My link profile can increase dramatically if my homepage is only crawled every 10 days. I don't want Google to be like : WTF ? 345 new links ? Take this penalty buddy => Do you feel it ?

This depends more on the age of your site. If you've had it up a week and start getting 100s of links per day, Google will recognize unnatural link building. If you've been around a few months and start getting a few hundred a week, I don't see a problem.

My questions are:

1/ How do make your homepage content dynamic and get the spiders coming back ?

If you're using WP as a blog, you're fine.

2/ What are your experiences in ranking for your homepage ? Do you have any tips for me ?

• Make sure to link any instances of your main keyphrase in your posts, back to your homepage
• Get the majority of external links to your homepage, but do deep linking to posts/pages as well
• Add "nofollow" tags to outgoing affiliate links
• Don't over think things
• Get more links
• Write more content
• Dominate the SERPs
• Get paid

[Sebastien]

Hey,

I noticed that my homepage doesn't get crawled often from :

1/ The Google cache
2/ Google webmaster tools

I must say that the site I am talking about is 2 months old so maybe this is a factor... But this has been sort a trend for multiple sites.

Thanks for the tips !

-- Sebastien