My profiles:
"All things can not be easily discoverable because everything is limited. You have limited screen real estate, users have limited attention spans, and abilities to perceive or understand things. Therefore, all design for people is a zero-sum game: tradeoffs must be made and priorities must be set if there’s any hope of a good outcome for customers."
But users arriving deep into our sites from search engines won't understand that our home page has fresh content! Hmm, maybe, but then it's not our one and only goal to drive them to our fresh home page, and it's not their one and only goal to consume the fresh news we have to offer them.
So, yes, you can improve archive/deep pages to retain as many as those users as possible (most will hit Back whatever you do, but you still can make business with the rest) but it shouldn't be a blinking button context (make it sell the home page! make it sell the reports! make it sell the newsletters!) There's a limit to the depth and breadth of what you can let first-time visitors discover from any one page.
05/04/04 update: Peter Horan, CEO of About.com:
"What we're trying to do is map our site to the way people use media today," he said. "More folks are coming to the site via search and via links to articles. Our mission is to make every article page a front door for the site. It shouldn't matter to a user how they came or where they land; they should immediately feel in control."