Perhaps the title reminds you of that old cartoon labeled, Look Mom No Hands, where the young boy bravely rides his bicycle with both hands in the air. In some versions there is a follow-up where he proclaims, Look Mom No Teeth.
This post may possibly represent the same kind of risky behavior. It stems from that outside-in view that we are now applying to websites. Frequent readers of this blog may not notice any difference. The blog Home page has always included only a single post and this post looks exactly the same. The only way of spotting the difference is by looking at the address field at the top of your browser. Although you may have followed a link to the domain, http://www.staygolinks.com/, you will note that the link displayed there is now the permalink for this particular single post. For quick reference, we will call this the LMNHP approach, not to be confused with the Lucknow Muzaffarpur National Highway Project.
Why a Home Page causes problems
Not having a Home Page brings a number of advantages. If you write a particularly good blog post, it will often perform well in keyword listings. This is helped because Google factors in the recency of new web pages by giving them a higher ranking in the search engine results page (SERP). What you may have noticed if you did a keyword search to spot new blog posts, is that often the first entry shown by Google is the Home page of the blog rather than the specific blog post. As further blog posts when written push that particular blog post off the Home Page, then a keyword search will some time later show the correct blog entry as the appropriate entry rather than the blog Home Page.
Part of the reason for this is that the blog Home page has many back links or inlinks pointing to it which causes it to outrank new blog posts which have very few links. This after all is the fundamental principle of the Google search algorithm. The Home page has the highest PageRank and other web pages have lower values. Indeed if they are very recent, they may not even have a value assigned.
The advantages of no Home page
This blog has now changed the balance by immediately redirecting visitors who visit the website to a web page which shows only the latest blog entry. This is a permanent 301 redirection, which should ensure that any inlink to this web page are correctly assigned to it rather than to the website as a whole.
You may wonder why there should be a permanent redirection when this latest post will only be on the front page for a little while, perhaps days or even hours. The thinking here is that for a little while the most important web page on the website is the latest blog entry. It will be assigned back links, some of which are intended for that particular blog post, rather than for the website as a whole. Indeed for a blog this is probably true in the majority of cases. Once the latest post has become a previous post, then it may receive additional back links from other sources as normally happens.
Finding a No Home Page solution
Knowing what I wanted to do, i.e. not have a homepage, I decided to bounce my crazy idea off two of my fellow Cre8asite Forums moderators, Donna Fontenot and Pierre Far. Pierre who is a wizard in these matters in a trans-Atlantic chat session, rapidly came up with a solution. He suggested that the best way was to modify the front end of the index.php file in my blog theme. His solution worked like a charm. It is shown in the image below. The new code surrounded by the yellow rectangle is inserted within the first instruction in the index.php file.
If in your theme, you use a home.php file rather than having the index.php file produce the Home page, then the code should be inserted there.
There would seem to be no downsides on this LMNHP approach and the upside is that rather than creating a homepage with a high PageRank, you spread out those PageRank contributions over individual blog posts as they are created.
If anyone has concerns about this approach, then it would be most useful to have them mentioned in comments here. Equally if you feel there are distinct advantages to this approach, then your contributions would be most appreciated
Update
This approach seems to be performing well in the SERPs and producing higher search engine rankings.
