I want to write articles for related content other than what is on my website to try and rank higher in the search engines but i am a little worried that if people link to the articles that the words they use to link to the articles wont help me rank higher on my home page of the website just the individual articles themselves. I may recieve more traffic to my webpage but the quality of the visitors would be a little less as they may not be interested in the product i have to offer just to the article that i wrote. This may generate some income as i intend to place affiliate links in the articles but perhaps my products sales will lower? Do i have the right thinking? Anyone care to share their opinions on how adding articles slightly off topic to your webpage will effect the sales of the products on your website?

Off-topic or irrelevant content to your site might not be helpful specially in SE ranking and may result to confusion of what your site is all about.

WHY does your "home" page have to first??

You might be "precious" about it, but NOBODY else is. They want the best page that answers their query, and that is what the SEs try to provide.

Concentrate on your USERS NOT the search engines.

Contents irrelevant to your site confuses both users and spiders.

Oh please!!!!!

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Oh please!!!!!

he he- It's another one of those threads Chris. I sometimes wonder if it's worth going out your way giving useful advice...

Aye!

What always puzzles me is that while plenty of people manage to believe the drivel about "keyword density", "too many keywords" etc etc. And manage to miss completely the obvious examples that demonstrate that it is obviously untrue.

This particular "mismatched pages" or pages not "on same theme" is so obviously so far off true that it only needs a cursory glance at Wikipedia, About.com or dictionary.com or the "article directories" that the SAME people rave on about, to see that it is a total fallacy.
How about "social media sites"?, "squidoo hubs"? Where the pages aren't even created by the same person? Never mind on the same "topic"/"theme" or even the over-used related?

I understand how they can mislead search engines but the articles i am writing will help the users of my website as well. Alot of my users have interests that related to my product.

Lets just say I have website to buy domain names. Say I own PurchaseDomainNames.com which i dont but just as an example. But on that website I want to include articles on affiliate marketing, google adsense, and other ways to make money online. Do you guys think this would benefit me? Or would it just confuse the search engines?

So you are saying that adding the articles will not effect the home page. The reason i am worried about the home page is it the major pitch page to buy my product. I will be making money through affiliate marketing in the articles(well i hope so anyways) plus it will drive more traffic to my site. Is there anyway it could possibly hurt me?

It's confused you

The "keyword domain" thing is just another myth come about by people who jump to a conclusion and then use deductive reasoning to postulate erroneous theories

Thanks, Chris! Will post articles.

My logic is articles will bring more visitors to my site that may be interested in my product if not thats okay because hopefully they find the article helpful and may click an affiliate link which get me profit anyway.

If your going to post an unrelated content for an article ..why not posting it on a different site/blog and not directly!! It's a bit confusing for the reader and it won't be a good sign to have a value visitor for your site. It's useful but yeah you won't have a fast result on what you are doing but eventually your previous readers find it informative and grateful of what you have shared for them, and about then that's when you'll see that there's a bit difference on the page results, link, etc.

I don't know if this will be useful to you but it works for me. Goodluck

It's a good job Wikipedia doesn't such a low opinion of their "readers" isn't it??

If you are here to learn, then learn to observe not simply continue to accept the "wisdom" of the "experts" who still think it is 1999.

People are now more savvy about the internet and websites, they are intelligent and understand things (they always did of course but the "experts" couldn't accept that!!

Would you go get 10,000 books if you wanted a dictionary?
Would you go and get 500,000 individual books if you needed an encyclopedia?

If no, why do you believe that each website should be on one "topic"??

Credit people with INTELLIGENCE They don't want to jump all over the place to read something. Now here's the important bit, and I would like you to read this and read it again.

IF a visitor can read what they need on ONE site they are more likely to STAY and even RETURN!!.

Why do you keep coming back to WMT??

Could it be because here we cover a diverse range of subjects that may be useful to you??
NOW how surprising is that??????

I understand exactly what you are saying and completely agree with you. That was my thinking at first. I basically just didnt want the search engines to get confused like hmm what is your website really about? I thought it was about this but now its this.

search engines don't get confused.

every page is a separate entity and is "themed" by it's own content (and in Googles case) by the anchor text of links pointing to it.

Thanks again for your help, Chris.