A recent statement by a Googler seems to strongly emphasize that the home page is the most important page on a website for Google. And that’s a little different than how some in the search community consider which page is more important.
Links are commonly understood to play an important role in telling Google which pages on a website are important.
But there are several statements by Googlers that may indicate that the home page can be the most important part of a website.
Home Page Importance
The home page used to be considered the most important page on a website in the early days of SEO because everyone was getting directory links and reciprocal links that resulted in links to the home page. This, in turn, made the home page the most powerful.
But these days the most important pages for many (but not all) sites are generally the inner pages because people link to (or build links to) content. It’s a long-standing link building trend to build links to important internal pages so that pages about XYZ have a better chance of ranking for XYZ, etc.
How important is the homepage to Google?
So it was somewhat surprising to see Gary Illyes emphatically state that a site’s home page is the most important page to Google.
Context is in a Search Off the Record podcast (linked at the end of this article) about debugging technical SEO issues with a website. This specific part was about how to find out if the traffic drop is a technical or quality issue.
It has happened elsewhere that people quote a few sentences that a Googler uttered or quote two sentences from a 31 page patent and make unsubstantiated claims based on statements taken out of context.
That’s why I show the context so that the statement makes sense in the way it was said.
Illyes says:
“First, you want to find out if the page is in Search or not. Because if the page isn’t in Search, you’ve already narrowed it down to two very specific things.”
In this context of checking if Google can crawl the site, continue:
“I usually start with the home page, because I can’t speak for other search engines, obviously, but from Google’s perspective, the home page is the most important page on the site, and the home page is a is a bit vague here, because it might be the page where users land when they enter your domain name or hostname.
Like if www.example.com redirects to www.example.com/foo/bar, that will be your home page.
Check it out because we at Google will work hard to index or crawl and index it.
If that’s not indexed, you’re probably in some trouble.”
That’s a pretty strong statement about how important the homepage is to Google.
Different ways the homepage is important to Google
John Mueller has made statements about how Google uses the home page as a starting point to crawl a website for new pages and also to understand the importance of pages by looking at how many clicks a page has from the home page start
In 2020, John Mueller said something similar in the context of answering a question about the importance of pages linking from the home page.
Mueller explained:
“…on many websites, the home page is the most important part of the website. So we recrawl it quite often and from there we try to find new and updated pages or other important pages.
So what’s going to happen is we’re going to see that the home page is really important, the things linked from the home page are generally pretty important as well.
And then… as you move away from the home page, we’ll think that’s probably less critical.
That pages linked directly from the home page are important is well known, but it bears repeating. In a well-organized website, the main category pages and any other important pages will be linked from the home page.”
Mueller has been consistent with this view on the home page.
We can even go all the way back to 2018 where Mueller said something similar.
In response to a question about whether it matters how many slashes are in a URL, John Mueller mentioned that the home page was the “strongest” page on a website.
This could be a reference to the home page being the most linked to and therefore the “strongest” page on the site. But he didn’t elaborate on that point, so you can’t say for sure.
Mueller said:
“What we care a little about is how easy it is to find the content.
So, especially if your home page is generally the strongest page on your website, and from the home page it takes multiple clicks to get to one of these stores, that makes it very harder to understand that these stores are really very important.
On the other hand, if it’s a click from the home page to one of those stores, that tells us that those stores are probably pretty relevant, and we should probably give them some weight too in the search results.
So it’s more a matter of how many links you have to click to actually get to that content rather than what the URL structure itself looks like.”
How important is the homepage to Google?
I’m not saying that the home page is the most important part of a website for Google, regardless of whether it’s the most linked page or not. This may just be a generalization and not a general fact that the home page is the most important page for Google.
But…
It is interesting that there are many statements from Googlers about how Google uses homepage links as a starting point to understand the importance of inner pages. Also, there is the recent statement by Gary Illyes emphasizing that a site’s home page is important to Google.
Listen to the Search Off The Record podcast at minute 5:50 and decide:
Featured image by Shutterstock/fizkes
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