What is the recommended practice for badges and seals on the home page.
-
What is the recommended practice for badges and seals on the home page. They are currently at the bottom of my nav. menu and thus appear on every page. i have them nofollowed but does that still consume page rank. Is it best to get them on to the footer lower on the page or to perhaps not to have them on the home page and place them deeper on the site.
-
Thank you for a great informative response.
-
If you have authentic badges such as Verisign, McAfee, TRUSTe, etc. those badges cost money, must be earned by meeting requirements, and provide real value to both the site and it's users. You should ensure your users are clearly aware of those badges.
In most cases, I recommend displaying the trust badges prominently on the home page. They should appear above the fold so they are seen immediately upon page loading. Keep in mind many visitors will see your site and decide within 5 seconds whether to explore it further or bounce. Offering recognizable symbols which display trust goes a long way when visiting an otherwise unknown website.
There is no solid best practice the SEO community has agreed upon. If you are a well-known, trusted business then you do not necessarily need any trust badges, and if you do have them they can be displayed anywhere on your site. That is not to say the badges don't offer value, but if you are Sears, AT&T or other well-established companies, most of your visitors solidly trust your company before they ever visit your site. If you are an otherwise unknown company, then the mere presence of trust badges can be the difference between a visitor who explores your site or a fast bounce. Trust badges can also be the difference between a visitor and a sale.
With respect to nofollowing them, I see no benefit in doing such. All visible links on your page consume PR whether they are followed or not. I am confident Google understands trust badges and handles their PR flow quite well.
If you are in doubt about trust badges or any other aspect of your site design, I highly recommend A/B testing. Present your site to 50% of your users with the trust badges in one location, and then to 50% of your visitors with the badges in another location. Test for a period and then compare your analytics between the two pages. Depending on your site's traffic, you may have enough data after a day to make a determination, or it may take more then a month to get a good, solid data set.
Also be sure the trust badges are properly installed. If you click on a trust badge, an authentic screen should appear verifying your participation in the trust badge program. If the badge is not properly installed, you will just see an image and it is highly suspect the website is a fraud and misrepresenting their participation in the program.
A last point, there is a big difference between trust badges. Earning a trust badge from a recognized leading company offers value. Earning a trust badge from an unknown company has almost no value. A security seal from VeriSign or McAfee is highly valued. A security seal from Comodo or other providers is not of much value to users as most never heard of the company. It's the same idea as if you earned recognition from Consumers Reports with a "Best in Class" product award, versus if you earned recognition from Consumers Protection Agency (I just made the name up) with the same award.
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
-
Combining products - edit existing product page or 301 redirect to new page?
We want to combine existing products - e.g. 'hand lotion' and 'body lotion' will become 'hand & body lotion'. As such, we'll need to combine the two product pages into one. What would be the best route to take in terms of SEO to do this? My initial reaction is to create a new product page and then 301 or 302 redirect the old products to the new product page depending on if the change is permanent or temporary. Would you agree? Or am I missing something?
On-Page Optimization | | SwankyApple1 -
Should I change our main category pages to product listing pages?
With the thought of improving user experience, as well as rankings in Google, I'm considering changing our main category pages to product listing pages (with sub-categories remaining, still). These main category pages are very standard and don't link to any informational content, such as buyers guides, etc. What's driven this is the latest Google core update. I've noticed our main competitor (who we were out-ranking before... but not now) now uses this approach. I can see the benefit from a user perspective, i.e. less clicks to reach products. What's the pros/cons from an SEO point of view, please? Could the potential duplication of content be an issue? For context, we have about 2,000 products and website is on Magento 2.
On-Page Optimization | | alifeofjoy1 -
Will it upset Google if I aggregate product page reviews up into a product category page?
We have reviews on our product pages and we are considering averaging those reviews out and putting them on specific category pages in order for the average product ratings to be displayed in search results. Each averaged category review would be only for the products within it's category, and all reviews are from users of the site, no 3rd party reviews. For example, averaging the reviews from all of our boxes products pages, and listing that average review on the boxes category page. My question is, will this be doing anything wrong in the eyes of Google, and if so how so? -Derick
On-Page Optimization | | Deluxe0 -
On-Page Optimization Question
My company sells Blue widgets and we are located in Denver, CO. Keyword research indicates that the the highest volume phrase is "blue widgets for sale in denver co". Should my meta title tag be: Blue Widgets for sale in Denver CO , and my h1 tag be the same? or should they be semantic phrases? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | FicklingCompany0 -
On-page keyword usage
SEOMOZ gave me all zeros for keyword usage. Why? The site is www.grass2greens.com and the keywords are "Asheville Landscaping Edible." The site includes these words in the title page and throughout the body text. I am not really sure, but maybe one cause for these low keyword usage ratings might be redirects or some meta tag issues, but I am really not sure. Any ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | dcaudio0 -
On-Page Report Card
How long will it take to see the results of changes made on my pages based on the On-Page Report Card recommendations? On-Page Report Card
On-Page Optimization | | sansonj0 -
Old pages
I have a site where I have 5,000 new products each year, I never waned to deleted the old pages due to links pointing to them and keywords. But I now have 20,000 plus pages, does having that many pages spread out my link juice or does it effect me in any other ways over having a site with 5,000 pages or should I keep not deleting old pages so I dont loose any links? Along with that I currently do not link to my old pages from my site so Im guessing google does not get to them very often if at all, if you agree to still keep them should I link to them somewhere? Because the products are not that simiiar and they do bring added value I dont think canonical would work here
On-Page Optimization | | Dirty0 -
Optimization of home page
Hi there I have an issue which, despite searching hard, I simply cannot find the right solution for. We have an index page that used to rank pretty well for a main industry keyword. However following a revamp of the site last year the kw slipped and no longer brings in decent traffic levels. The problem seems to be that the old static site had a sprinkling of variable anchor text links that brought value to the home page. Instead of the main anchor being "home" we would revert to "main keyword" and variations across the site sometimes in t he content but mainly on the nav bars. However the new CMS design structure restricts us considerably with anchor distribution and so instead we opted for the site logo on the masthead to have an ALT tag for "main keyword" but so as not to game google too much we added .."home" to the tag. Probably pointless but we figured it could do no harm. This ALT text is site wide Problem now is that we have lost the spread of internal nav bar anchors and variety etc. We have slipped in the serps for "main keyword" and I cant help thinking we are not maximising the anchors as we should. So what Im coming to is this.... How can we tell if Google is picking up the ALT tage anchor as the main anchor to rank the site at the expense of all internal text anchors. Despite retaining lots of embedded anchors - according to the Moz metrics these are not being picked up because OSE suggests the ALT tag anchor is taking precedence. The serps probably support this view as well. Should we: a) Vary the masthead ALT if there is no way of avoiding this being the most important link / anchor on the page b) Remove the ALT anchor and instead opt for content links high on the page (we do have nav bar links saying "Home" site wide as well which may overrid the embedded links?) c) Leave the ALT alone and still push for content anchors as described in b) What is the best way to handle this..? Best wishes and thanks Morch
On-Page Optimization | | Morch0