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I have just been asked whether or not having a domain such as exampledomain.com/keyword as the home URL to a WordPress site is a good idea or not.

We are a digital agency so we would be going for exampledomain.com/digital-agency as the root URL.

I know this is a vague question but any ideas or input would be awesome and how would this affect the sites page rank?

I am redirecting the home page to a duplicate of the homepage and just having the permalink as /digital-agency

Cheers

Sam Kelham
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  • google doesnt really tell you how much it effects page rank, but yea it probably helps a bit – David Apr 26 '16 at 02:08
  • I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is asking for SEO advice. (It might be on-topic on [webmasters.se].) – unor Apr 26 '16 at 14:32

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This sounds like a really weird idea to be honest.

Firstly, it won't affect PageRank at all, because that is all to do with inbound links (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank for a primer).

I'm guessing though that you meant whether it would affect how your site ranks for that keyword. It would probably help, but only marginally, and depending on how you do it, it might actually hurt.

If you do go ahead with it, make sure you do the redirect properly. You're going to want to do a 301 redirect, which, since you mentioned Wordpress, you can do using the wp_redirect function, passing 301 as the second parameter. You need to ensure that your original home page can not be accessed at all, because you don't want to have duplicate content.

On a philosophical rather than technical note, it's clearly an attempt to game Google. I generally take the approach that I should code and write for a human audience, and that if I do that well, Google's constantly evolving algorithms will notice and reward me for it. Therefore I personally pay little attention to trying to game it, because Google is likely to figure it out and either ignore it, or worse, penalize it, in the future.

I'd therefore instead write on your home page about how you are a great digital agency. Include digital agency in your name (eg. Sam's Digital Agency), and make sure your name is in <h1> tags, etc. etc.

Tim Malone
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