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
-
Home page cannibal
I was wondering if others had the same problem I have. It appears Google loves that home page too much and I'm having a difficult time getting it to rank the page I really want. And that happens if a keyword I want to rank for only appears on the home page one time with a keyword density of .1%. Take vanillaqueen.com for example. The home page ranks on the first page for "bulk vanilla beans" and not http://vanillaqueen.com/shop/category/vanilla-beans/ or http://vanillaqueen.com/five-reasons-why-buying-bulk-vanilla-makes-good-sense/ And I'll add another one that I recently took on. This is a personal injury attorney in a large city so there is a ton of competition who have been doing SEO for a very long time. (Fortunately he also does business and civil litigation law to keep the business going). Last month, according to webmaster tools, he got a couple of clicks (hey, it's something!) on "personal injury attorney [his city]" on page 2 in the SERPS, but it was his home page. http://bit.ly/1Gvumlm **In this case I don't mind people landing on the home page, but does the fact that another page that is much better optimized for those keywords indicate a penalty on that page? And is his rank lower because the better page is not ranking and Google has to find the next best thing in the home page? ** Has anyone else experienced that and what have you done to get Google to not go home? P.S. The law site is a huge challenge because of the competition. Any help you pros out there can offer to get this underdog out of hiding will be much appreciated. We're starting a smart, strategic content marketing plan now that I'm very excited about.
On-Page Optimization | | katandmouse1 -
Duplicate Page Content Should we 301 - Best Practices?
What would be the best way to avoid a Duplicate Page Content for these type of pages. Our website generates user friendly urls, for each page..
On-Page Optimization | | 365ToursSafaris
So it is the same exact page, just both versions of the url work.. Example: http://www.safari365.com/about-africa/wildebeest-migration http://www.safari365.com/wildebeest-migration I don't think adding code to the page will work because its the same page for the incorrect and correct versions of the page. I don't think i can use the URL parameter setting because the version with /about-africa/ is the correct (correct as it it follows the site navigation) I was thinking of using the htaccess to redirect to the correct version.. Will that work ? and does it follow best Practices ? any other suggestions that would work better ?0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
If a page has more than 100 links, rather than splitting up the page into multiple pages, is it ok to use name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />? The page in question lists links to articles so the page itself isn't that important to appear in serps, but the articles are the helpful content pages: www.ides.com/articles/processing/injection-molding/
On-Page Optimization | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Duplicate page
Just getting started and had a question regarding one of the reports. It is telling me that I have duplicate pages but I'm not sure how to resolve that.
On-Page Optimization | | KeylimeSocial0 -
Duplicated Page Content
I have encountered this weird problem about duplicate page content. My site got 3 duplicate content similar on the link structure below. If I'm going to use rel canonical does it help to resolve the duplication problem? Thanks http://www.sample.com http://www.sample.com/ http://www.sample.com/index.php
On-Page Optimization | | mattvectorbpo0 -
Exstinguishing Page Rank?
Hi Guys, Here is a thought. Google gives more weight to links in content, less to navigation etc.. Therefore if they say give 50% of a pages rank to a link within content and 50% to the the other elements. What happens to the total pagerank from a page if you have not utilized in page content links? (is it lost) If this is the case, and you have a site that does not use content links on every page, are you loosing value (and hard earned) pagerank. Google did mention sometime back about pagerank being exstinguished with the nofollow tag. I would be interested to hear what others think? Cheers Scott
On-Page Optimization | | Jurnii0 -
Best practice for Meta-Robots tag in categories and author pages?
For some of our site we use Wordpress, which we really like working with. The question I have is for the categories and authors pages (and similiar pages), i.e. the one looking: http://www.domain.com/authors/. Should you or should you not use follow, noindex for meta-robots? We have a lot of categories/tags/authors which generates a lot of pages. I'm a bit worried that google won't like this and leaning towards adding the follow, noindex. But the more I read about it, the more I see people disagree. What does the community of Seomoz think?
On-Page Optimization | | Lobtec0 -
SEO strategy recommendations?
Hi My website http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk is now ranking on the 1st page of Bing and Google for phrases such as Chartered Accountant Swansea and Tax Planners Swansea But the phrase 'accountants swansea' is still performing poorly - as it is near the bottom of the second page? Would I be better placing more accountant swansea phrases on the homepage of the site or would this have an adverse effect on the current 'Chartered Accountants Swansea' ranking as would this be classed as keyword cannabilisation? So would it be better to further optimise http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk/accounting.htm and include the phrases Accountants Swansea and Auditors Swansea or would this act against the homepage? Sorry for the questions I am just looking for the best route forward to further boost the ranking on additional terms as the majority of the 1st page listings seem to weak?
On-Page Optimization | | idv0