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Changing homepage to "choose your country" - affect on SERPs?

Want to add splash page with links to other ccTLDs for various regions

fitzer

9:22 pm on Jan 12, 2007 (gmt 0)

I have a client who's dot com site ranks #1 for their targeted KW across all major SEs. They have many other sites on other ccTLDs that represent their various international divisions. These other sites are all unique from one another (for the most part), so duplicate content is not much of a concern.

To the point: My client wants to change the dot com homepage to a splash page that contains country/region selection allowing visitors to reach the appropriate, regional, ccTLD site.

My concern: Will changing the dot com's homepage to something like this kill it's SERPs rank?

Would changing the homepage's meta robots to "noindex, follow" help (at all) or hinder?

Are there any other threads covering this issue?

Your feedback is much appreciated.

Robert Charlton

10:23 pm on Jan 13, 2007 (gmt 0)

The splash page is a very bad idea.

I'd use the current .com home page both as the default English language page, as you have it now... and also link from that home page to the international divisions.

You'd want the links to the international divisions to be visible to the user, but to have as little effect as possible on your current site architecture and PageRank distribution.

How you choose to set up those links would depend on how competitive your search targets are, what your current site architecture is, what your current PR is, how much lead you have on your competitors, and how many foreign divisions you have.

fitzer

9:56 pm on Jan 14, 2007 (gmt 0)

Thanks Robert - helpful insight. I agree that the splash is a bad idea. Unfortunately, that's what the client is set on.

A SEO friend of mine suggested moving the current homepage to a subfolder, like "mysite.com/en/" and 301 redirecting the current homepage URL there. Once the SEs have updated their indexes with the new homepage location, I can remove the 301 and have the splash page there.

The only problem with the above solution is that all SE traffic will still go to the current homepage content, but at the new URL. So SE traffic will bypass the country selection splash screen, defeating the purpose of changing the homepage in the first place.