I'm currently working on a new landing page for this site. I want the landing page to replace the existing front page of the site. However I don't want to lose the Page Rank of the current front page - so I plan to insert a JavaScript that immediately redirects from the front page to the new landing page.
Is this solution a bad idea, will it affect the PageRank or rankings of the front page?
Do not use a JavaScript redirect. That's SEO suicide. Search engines don't handle JavaScript well if they handle it at all. JavaScript redirects also don't use HTTP headers that tell the search engines your page has permanently moved and no association is made between the old homepage and the new one. Not to mention anyone without JavaScript turned on will not get redirected.
First let me ask, why not just replace the home page with the new one?
But if for some reason you can't do that use a server side 301 redirect. Here's an example in Apache .htaccess:
redirect 301 /oldindex.html /newindex.html
You don't need to do any kind of redirection at all for the home page, because the URL doesn't change. The home page is yoursite.com and should never be yoursite.com/index.html, yoursite.com/home.php or anything like that.
All you need to do is make sure the root domain returns different content (i.e. your landing page). If you currently have index.html or index.php you can simply backup the old file and replace it with your new page. If you have something more complex you'll need to use htaccess to do a rewrite of some sorts.
As far as I know, Google PR of your front page (or of any page) is mainly affected by the number of NOFOLLOW links to your front page Google can find in the WWW.
So I don't see how could you lose so much PR by simply replacing page contents.
What you might lose is Google search results positions that obviously depends much also on the page contents, I mean a page talking only about "cats" is difficult that shows up when someone search for "hand painted glasses" even if the page has a huge PR.
So can't you just FTP download your current front page, and back it up on your PC, than you substitute it with the new page. If after some months you see that you are losing positions on Google search results for the search queries you are interested in, you just simply ftp upload back the old front page, that's it, it will take some months, but there is not much you could do.
