Do Google Think Homepages Are the Most Important?
According to a number of Google employees’ comments, Google may consider a website’s homepage to be its most crucial component – Google Homepage (7enz Website)
The front page of a website is the most significant page to Google, according to a recent revelation made by a Google employee. Furthermore, that differs somewhat from how some members of the search community determine which page is most crucial.
Many acknowledge that links play a crucial role in informing Google about the essential pages on a website.
However, certain remarks made by Google employees seem to suggest that a website’s homepage might be its most crucial component.
Google Homepage (7enz Website)
Value of the Home Page
In the early days of search engine optimization, people considered the main page of a website to be the most significant, as they mostly acquired links to the page from directories and reciprocal linking. The home page became the most powerful as a result.
However, because people link to content (or create links to it) these days, the inner pages of most (but not all) websites are usually the most significant ones. Building links to significant inner pages has long been a popular strategy for link building, giving XYZ-related pages a higher ranking for XYZ, and so on.
Thus, it came as a bit of a surprise to see Gary Illyes vehemently declare that a website’s homepage is the most significant page to Google.
The context is found in a Search Off the Record podcast on troubleshooting technical SEO issues with a website (listed at the end of this post). This particular section dealt with determining whether dropped traffic is the result of a quality or technical problem.
On other websites, people have been known to take passages from a 31-page patent or a few quotes from a Google employee and use them to support false allegations.
To ensure that the comment makes sense in the context in which it was stated, I am providing the context.
Google Homepage (7enz Website)
Illyes remarks:
“You should first determine if the page is in Search or not. Because you’ve already limited it to two really specific options if the page is not in Search.”
In the context of determining whether Google can crawl the website, he goes on:
“Since I obviously cannot speak for other search engines, I usually start with the home page. According to Google, the homepage is the most important page on the website, though it can be a little ambiguous because it could be the page that users land on when they enter your host name or domain name.
Like if www.example.com redirects to www.example.com/foo/bar, then that will be your homepage.
Examine it, as Google and we will make every effort to crawl and index it.
Should that not be indexed, you most likely have a few issues.”
That conveys a strong message about Google’s importance of the homepage.
Different Ways Google Values Its Homepage
According to claims made by John Mueller, Google begins its crawl of a website from the homepage in order to locate new pages. It also uses this information to determine the importance of pages by counting the number of clicks that separate a page from the homepage.
John Mueller made a similar statement in 2020 when responding to a query regarding the significance of pages linked from the main page.
Mueller clarified:
“…the front page is frequently the most significant section of a website. We thus strive to locate new and updated pages or other significant pages by regularly re-crawling that.
As a result, we will see that while the main page is crucial, the content linked from it is also typically quite significant.
And after that, we’ll presumably consider this to be less important as it gets farther from the main page.
Although it’s often recognized, it bears reiterating that pages that are directly linked from the main page are significant. The main category pages and any other significant pages on a well-organized website will be linked from the home page.”
Mueller has maintained this stance over the webpage consistently.
We can even go all the way back to Mueller’s remarks from 2018.
John Mueller stated that the homepage is “the strongest” page on a website in response to a query regarding whether the number of forward slashes in a URL matters.
That may allude to the fact that the homepage is the page that receives the most links, making it the “strongest” page on the website. However, he didn’t go into detail about that, so it’s impossible to say for sure.
Mueller stated:
How simple it is to locate the content is something that matters to us somewhat.
We will find it much more difficult to comprehend that these stores are truly rather significant if, in particular, your homepage is often the strongest page on your website and it requires several clicks to get to one of these stores from the homepage.
However, if it just takes one click to navigate to one of these retailers from the home page, it suggests that these businesses are probably rather relevant and that we should consider include them in the search results as well.
Therefore, rather than the actual structure of the URL, it’s more about how many links you have to click through to reach that content.
How Significant Is Google’s Homepage?
I’m not claiming that, whether or not it is the page with the most links, the homepage is the most significant portion of a website to Google. The homepage being the most essential page to Google may only be a generalization rather than a universal truth.
But..
It’s noteworthy that a lot of quotes from Google employees have surfaced regarding how Google determines the importance of inner sites based on links from the homepage. In addition, Gary Illyes recently made a remark emphasizing how essential a website’s homepage is to Google.
If you need a great homepage that effectively harnesses these insights for your website, approach 7enz Digital and IT Solutions. Our expertise in creating impactful homepages can help optimize your site’s visibility and performance in Google searches.
