Footer link to home page?
-
Quick question - is it a best practice to add a footer link on each page of a website that points back to your home page, with the anchor text being your official brand name?
-
There is of course a difference between hiding text and being user friendly.
If you read Google's policy on hidden text, you'll see there is no mention of this method. The link isn't downsized to 1px, nor is it impossible to see for humans. So I don't agree Erica, on this instance
That would be totally different if we'd do this with more text than just one (brand name) word, reducing visibility, placing [Viagra-text] behind the logo/image that has nothing to do with viagra, etc
-
agreed Erica
-
not sure that's its a problem to do it - there are thousands of respectable sites out there with footer navigation that includes a link to the home page - this is no different than one link with the brand name in it.
-
I'd be careful about hiding text. Google doesn't like that.
-
I wouldn't put links to your own brand name in the footer.... more like in the header or horizontal navigation.
-
yeah I think there is debate as to whether the actual text link (hidden with CSS) is more powerful than the img alt text (which has the brand name in it now). Maybe I'll test with both and see what works best.
-
I understand, no problem In this scenario I would actually link to the page with the brand name as anchor. But I wouldn't put it in the footer. With a simple tweak in your css file, you can make a text link and still get the logo up in the top left.
Can't reproduce it right now (not a css expert) but I know it works because I've used it before.
-
Hey man - yeah, logo links back. Main purpose of footer link would be to sure up the internal linking that signals the engines that the home page should rank for the brand name. Background here is that I am actually dealing with a site that I took over from another SEO. He had a footer link on each page linking back to the home page with just the brand name as the anchor text. My client recently went through a name change which included a domain change as well. The other "wrench" in this one is that the new name is not extremely unique, and is basically the product name of another huge corporations flagship product. Sorry I can't provide specifics on the actual names. I only give that background to explain why I won't "easily rank for my brand name" in this specific situation.
-
No. You'll easily rank for your brand name, so there's no need to do that.
Footer links are an old practice. They aren't used a lot for navigation and thus search engines will not value those kinds of links a lot. (Read: almost none)
There's also a lot of writing about the fact that only the first link to certain link gets "counted". You probably have the logo in the top left directing to the home page? So that will cancel out the footer links' use.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
City and state link stuffing in footer
A competitor has links to every state in the U.S., every county in our state and nearby states, and every city in those nearby states. All with corresponding link text and titles that lead to pages with thin, duplicate content. They consistently rank high in the SERPS and have for years. What gives--I mean, isn't this something that should get you penalized?
On-Page Optimization | | nkolson0 -
Links in my website are indexed as separate pages
Hi All, We have pages which has names of people which we have created a Alink when clicked it goes to the related persons name. Now Google has indexed it as a seperate page example www.xyz.com/person/name www.xyz.com/person/name?alinks Now the same page is seen in google 2 times. How can i handle this please
On-Page Optimization | | jomin740 -
Too many on-page links
Hi, I've apparently got too many on-page links on 79 of my webpages. The majority of these pages are category pages, like this: https://www.turnkeymortgages.co.uk/mortgage-advice/mortgages/... so, what's a person to do? Obviously the page would be useless without the links. Should I just ignore these 'errors'? Or is there something else I should do? I don't want to appear manipulative by labelling them nofollow... Thanks, Amelia
On-Page Optimization | | CommT0 -
On-Page Report Card: Whats up with the TITLE of the page?
Started to fix the SEO issues on a customers website. When I run a "On-Page Report Card" It says that the title of the webpage:
On-Page Optimization | | maklarlabbet
www.visbymaklarna.se/visbymaklarna.html Is "visbymäklarna - Ditt förstahandsval på gotland." But if I check in the source code of the webbrowser the title should be:
name="title" content="Vi är mäklarna på Gotland som sätter människan i första rummet" /> (Actually this is with special encoding for the swedish characters. The title in coded text is: "Vi är mäklarna på Gotland som sätter människan i första rummet") Anyway the title of the webpage source code and the title of what SEOmoz reports is different. Why is that?0 -
Does Too Many On-Page Links on a Page Really Matters?
Does Too Many On-Page Links on a Page Really Matters? Especially if they are pointing to internal page?
On-Page Optimization | | AppleCapitalGroup1 -
Internal Links & Title Tags, Which Page Benifits?
The best way I can explain why question is with an example. Lets say I have a parent parent page that is focusing on a broad keyword.
On-Page Optimization | | donford
I also have a sub-page which is focused more on long-tail keyword variations. When I make an internal link and give it a title tag, should I give it the long-tail keyword for the juice, or should I use the broad keyword for the parent page's relevancy? Thanks for any help, advise or pointers.0 -
Canonical home page
I have a site that shows duplicate page content for: www.autoserviceexpertsonline and www.autoserviceexpertsonline/index.html When looking at the files using the cms (intuit) file manager, I only see the /index.html version. I added the Caononical tag referencing/pointing to both the domain name only and then changed to .../index.html No matter how I code this, the seomoz On-Site SEO Grader still has a problem with it. Is this a bug with the Grading program or am I doing something wrong? Please help as I think this is causing me problems with Google and I'd like to get this right for future sites I will be working on. Thanks, Bill
On-Page Optimization | | Marvo0 -
Are footer links at the end of each page still considered to be a valid tactic?
This is pretty much an opinion question, I was under the impression that footer links had been devalued almost to the point of uselessness, and if they weren't going to be of any real use to the users of the site why bother. I was speaking to a web developer though whose opinion I do largely trust who remains very pro footer links, and I was wondering what everyone else thought. Am I being too dismissive, or are footer links on the way out?
On-Page Optimization | | Tompt0