Is shortening posts by excerpts on the homepage, good SEO ?

Most of us did it either because the WordPress theme had such an option or because you saw someone else do it. So you assumed it is good.
So is really having homepage excerpts to your articles a good idea ? What’s wrong with displaying the entire article as such on the homepage ?

Before saying yes or no, let me take you through some SEO guidelines, so we can discuss this.

1 – Its always a good practice to utilize the homepage for interlinking to your articles, and making the best use of link power.
2 – Its good practice to avoid showing up the same page over and over again at various places, to avoid duplicate content.

Let’s dig further.

The homepage and number of links

The homepage often is the page that has most number of incoming links from other sites. And for the same reason, it might get credited with maximum authority and more link juice than any other page on the site.
Clever SEOs use this and share the link juice with as many pages as possible within the website by linking to them from the homepage.

So, lets say you have a site with 50 pages, and your homepage has a Google PageRank of 5. So you link all the 50 pages from the homepage so that it increases the chances of all the 50 pages getting a PR4 or closer.

Now, there is also a problem if the number of links on a page increases above 100. At least, this was a widely believed formula, that you should keep the number of links on a single page less than 100 or the Google bots won’t be able to crawl them entirely and might consider them as spam.
Recently, we’ve heard from Matt Cutts, that this is not the case anymore. Google bots have become cleverer that they can now crawl bigger file sizes and more links.
Having said that, I wouldn’t still go out and link to all the pages from the homepage, it doesn’t look natural that way right ?
In my opinion, the safe thing to do is to figure out after careful keyword research and traffic analysis, what pages require more importance, so that they get more search traffic, and then place them on the homepage. Link to them wisely with proper keyword anchor text, so that they get the right visibility through the right keyword.
So, rather than just blatantly going on to link everything possible from the homepage, and also not fretting about the number of links on the homepage, make a clear linking strategy involving the pages you want to highlight and considering the homepage real estate.

The Homepage and Duplicate content issue

Duplicate content on WordPress is defenitely avoidable, its not a bottle neck like on many other CMS’s. Its avoidable because there are many solutions available, like the nofollow meta tags, canonical tags etc. Homepages play an important role in creating duplicate content (at least technically). With a normal WordPress site structure, an article appears on the article page, category page, tag page and the homepage. To minimize this, trimming the articles on the homepage is a good idea, because it reduces replication.

Having said that, on authority websites or sites with huge traffic, having too many links on the homepage or displaying articles fully on the homepage, does no negative effect. Obviously, they have crossed the “proving point”, which is not the case with smaller websites. They have to do all the seemingly unnecessary things that might put them to trouble, and homepage excerpts are one.

So, having excerpts on homepage may be good SEO for smaller websites especially if they want to save some real estate space and utilize it for something creative, and generating user interest.

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