Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
On-page SEO
This is a question for the organic SEO experts, once you added the main keyword that you want to rank for in the homepage title, meta title plus meta description, perhaps once or twice in the text on the homepage. How often do you then write it in the content marketing, say blog posts, we want to rank higher on Google for "SEO agencies Cardiff" however if you mention this in the blog posts too much say once a week, this could lead to over optimisation issues?
On-Page Optimization | | sarahwalsh1 -
Why home Page is not showing showing in search results?
The USA Glitz I search the exact title & keyword but still its not showing though there is no related websites in this term. What can i do ? What kind of strategy needs to follow ? Kindly help me out . Thanks 😢
On-Page Optimization | | henrichjrr4201 -
Should we rename and update a page or create a new page entirely?
Hi Moz Peoples! We have a small site with a simple site navigation, with only a few links on the nav bar. We have been doing some work to create a new page, which will eventually replace one of the links on the nav bar. The question we are having is, is it better to rename the existing page and replace its content and then wait for the great indexer to do its thing, or perm delete the page and replace it with the new page and content? Or is this a case where it really makes no difference as long as the redirects are set up correctly?
On-Page Optimization | | Parker8180 -
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 -
Are there any SEO benefits changing the default home page filename (index.htm) to a keyword rich filename
II'm a newbie. I have a website using the default home page filename: index.htm. I have total control over the web server. I was wondering whether I can get any SEO improvements for my main keyword if I change the default filename with a filename that contains the main keyword, like our-main-product.htm (doing the 301 redirect and changing the server search order, of course)?
On-Page Optimization | | Grafimart0 -
Do we have too many links in our footer?
Hi guys, we have 41 links on our holiday(vacation) rental website, this seems too many when looking at best practice. 24 of these are links to community pages while 8 link to activities pages. The community and activity pages are also accessible from links on the top menu so they are not strictly necessary but do get 10% of site clickthroughs according to Google in-page analytics. I therefore do not want to remove the links if there is no good evidence that google will penalize us for this. What do you think would be best for our site? Thanks, John Tulley. footer.jpg
On-Page Optimization | | JohnTulley0 -
Is there a SEO penalty for multi links on same page going to same destination page?
Hi, Just a quick note. I hope you are able to assist. To cut a long story short, on the page below http://www.bookbluemountains.com.au/ -> Features Specials & Packages (middle column) we have 3 links per special going to the same page.
On-Page Optimization | | daveupton
1. Header is linked
2. Click on image link - currently with a no follow
3. 'More info' under the description paragraph is linked too - currently with a no follow Two arguments are as follows:
1. The reason we do not follow all 3 links is to reduce too many links which may appear spammy to Google. 2. Counter argument:
The point above has some validity, However, using no follow is basically telling the search engines that the webmaster “does not trust or doesn’t take responsibility” for what is behind the link, something you don’t want to do within your own website. There is no penalty as such for having too many links, the search engines will generally not worry after a certain number.. nothing that would concern this business though. I would suggest changing the no follow links a.s.a.p. Could you please advise thoughts. Many thanks Dave Upton [long signature removed by staff]0 -
Would it be bad to change the canonical URL to the most recent page that has duplicate content, or should we just 301 redirect to the new page?
Is it bad to change the canonical URL in the tag, meaning does it lose it's stats? If we add a new page that may have duplicate content, but we want that page to be indexed over the older pages, should we just change the canonical page or redirect from the original canonical page? Thanks so much! -Amy
On-Page Optimization | | MeghanPrudencio0