Finding the Homepage of the Website
To answer the website questions, you must visit the homepage associated with the URL in the task.
How do you find the homepage of the task URL? Click on the URL and examine the landing page. If the landing page is not the homepage of a website, you will usually see either a link labeled "home" or a logo to click on. The "home" link is usually at the top of the landing page, but sometimes you will see it at the bottom of the page.
In the following examples, we have included the URL of the task page, as well as the URL of its associated homepage. We have also included an image that shows where to click on the landing page to navigate to the homepage. In the image, you will see a red box around the link or the logo you would click to navigate to the homepage.
|
URL on the Task Page |
Homepage of the Website |
Image that shows where to click |
|
In this case, we will consider http://www.facebook.com
| ||
|
In this case, we will consider http://twitter.com
|
Whenever possible, look for a "home" link on the landing page, or try clicking on the logo at the top of the page. Sometimes, the navigation links and structure also have a clear hierarchy, with the homepage featured prominently. Webmasters usually make it easy to get to the homepage of the website, and homepages usually have links to a lot of helpful information you need to evaluate PQ.
If there is no clear home link or logo or navigation structure on the page you are evaluating, try looking at some other pages on the site. If finding the homepage is hard, usually either the website design is amateurish or the website is low quality. Use the questions in the next section to decide which.
Important: If all else fails, you can modify the URL by removing everything to the right of ".com" or ".org" in the URL.
Example 1: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux
Screenshot of the LP
Although there is no "home" link or logo on the landing page for this URL, we can get to the homepage (http://www.kernel.org/) by removing everything in the URL to the right of ".org".
The landing page for kernel.org is titled "The Linux Kernel Archives," and the page tells us that this "is the primary site for the Linux kernel source."
To find information about kernel.org, please visit the kernel.org Wikipedia page
.
You will learn that kernel.org is "a main repository of source code for the Linux kernel, the base of the popular Linux operating system." You can read about Linux here:
Linux Wikipedia page
.
Even though the landing page for http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux has an atypical layout and is not a "pretty" page, the website is the highest authority on Linux, and the page achieves its purpose very well. Software developers would be happy with the directory landing page.
Directory pages can be hard to rate. This particular directory page is a very high quality page. Other directory pages may be lower quality. Researching the reputation of the website will help you to assign an appropriate PQ rating.
Example 2: http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/arbwomn.htm
Screenshot of the LP
Although there is no "home" link or logo on the landing page and the page does not have nice formatting, we can modify the URL by removing everything to the right of ".edu." By doing so, we learn that the page comes from the Cornell University Library website:
This Cornell University Library Wikipedia article tells us that library.cornell.edu is the library system of Cornell University, a highly-respected university in the United States. In spite of the appearance of the page, we will take the reputation of Cornell University into consideration and assume that many users would be happy with the landing page.
Occasionally, your rating task will include a URL for which there are two or more justifiable "homepage" candidates. For example, you may find a landing page that has a "home" link, as well as a website logo with a link. Usually these links go to the same page, but sometimes they have different landing pages.
Or you may find a complicated relationship between subdomains and the top level domain associated with a URL. For example, you may not be sure whether the homepage of the URL http://finance.yahoo.com/news/category-stocks
is
http://finance.yahoo.com
or
http://www.yahoo.com). Many websites have a complicated directory structure, and you may not be sure which page is reasonably the "homepage" associated with the landing page of a given URL.
As always, please use your judgment. You may consider information from any reasonable homepage candidate. In general, please prefer the homepage candidate which has the most information relevant to the landing page.
Please note that we include finding the homepage as part of the Page Quality guidelines because we are trying to find information and answer questions about a specific landing page and the website it is associated with. Frequently, some of the information we need to know about the landing page (such as authorship, contact information, etc.) is not on the landing page itself because it is the same for every page on the site or subdomain, or it is contained within a certain branch of a directory on the site. Finding the homepage (or relevant subdomain or appropriate page in a directory) is a good technique for locating this kind of information. Please use any reasonable "homepage" candidate that allows you to find the information you need to rate effectively.
Note: Amateurish (i.e., non-professional) website design may not be a PQ issue, at least for certain types of pages (for example, websites of family photos). Amateurish website design is less acceptable for YMYL websites, such as legal, financial, and medical websites or shopping websites that ask for your credit card information.
« Previous Next »