Problem with links on the home page

[kunalg]

hi buddies can anyone help me in knowing that is there any penalty if we have external links on home page. Is our site discounted in any way because one of my site has only home page indexed in google and yahoo and it also has external link on the home page :confused:

[seobook]

if you link to other sites from your home page a portion of your home pages link popularity goes out to other sites. that may mean that you have a little less link popularity to flow through your site to the deep pages. other than that it shouldnt be a problem unless you are linking out to stuff that would appear to lower the credibility of your site

[Michael Martinez]

hi buddies can anyone help me in knowing that is there any penalty if we have external links on home page. Is our site discounted in any way because one of my site has only home page indexed in google and yahoo and it also has external link on the home page :confused:

I link to other sites from my home page all the time. It doesn't hurt in the least.

If your site is not being indexed in Google, it's not because you're linking to someone else from the home page.

[Marcia]

hi buddies can anyone help me in knowing that is there any penalty if we have external links on home page. Is our site discounted in any way because one of my site has only home page indexed in google and yahoo and it also has external link on the home page kunalg, as seobook pointed out, outbound links on the homepage are not generally a good idea for the average site - detracting somewhat from the interior site pages being only one factor. But the simple fact of having outbound links on the homepage isn't why you've only got the index page indexed.

Two things initially - run the homepage through an html validator - and make sure there are "normal" text links on the site so crawlers can navigate it. And read through what the seaarch engines say - using it as a checklist to measure whether your site meets guidelines.

Yahoo! Search Quality Guidelines (http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html)

Google Webmaster Guidelines (http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html)

Those are an excellent place to start, to make sure that there are no problems with the site that could have negative consequences.

[Michael Martinez]

kunalg,

Keep in mind that Google is indexing over 8,000,000,000 pages, and the sum total of all their PageRanks (link popularity as measured by a probability) is 1.0. So, losing some microscopic amount of link popularity is not a problem for a typical Web site.

If your site is appearing in the index, unless it's competing with some VERY link popular sites (and I have seen sites with as few as 51 links beating out sites with as many as 1400 links in search results) that have in excess of 5-10,000 links, you probably need to focus more on your site's content.

Your internal link structure is also important. If you have fifty pages on your site, they can all link to the home page and show the search engines that the home page is important (they should also link to a site map if you have that many, so the search engines will crawl it and so your visitors can use it if they get lost).