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
-
Is it better to keep a glossary or terms on one page or break it up into multiple pages?
We have a very large glossary of over 1000 industry terms on our site with links to reference material, embedded video, etc. Is it better for SEO purposes to keep this on one page or should we break it up into multiple pages, a different page for each letter for example? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | KenW0 -
Canonical home page references - logo link
should a website's logo be linked to the "abc.com/index.html" page or to the "abc.com" domain root? Is one better for the search engine robots?
On-Page Optimization | | mtishman1 -
Is it better to try and boost an old page that ranks on page #5 or create a better new page
Hello Everyone, We have been looking into our placements recently and see that one of our blog posts shows on page #5 for a popular keyword phrase with a lot of search volume. Lets say the keyword is "couples fitness ideas" We show on page 5 for a post /couples-fitness-ideas-19-tips-and-expert-advice/ We want to try and get on the first page for that phrase and wanted to know if it is better if we did one of the following: 1. Create a new page with over 100 ideas with a few more thousands of words. with a new url (thinking /couples-fitness-ideas) 2. Create a new page with a new url (thinking /couples-fitness-ideas) with the same content as the currently ranking post. We would want to do this for more freedom with layout and design of the page rather than our current blog post template. Add more content, let's say 100 more ideas. Then forward the old URL to the new one with a 301 redirect. 3. Add more content to the existing post without changing the layout and change the URL. Look forward to your thoughts
On-Page Optimization | | MobileCause0 -
Losing Page Rank
Hello Moz I launched a re-design of our site over the summer and we jumped in organic search for some keywords. Recently one of our landing pages is being hammered by Google last we we lost one position this week we lost 5 positions. Although, when I check the on-page grade Moz gives it an A is there a check sheet anyone has that I could go through to see if I have any common problems. Ryan
On-Page Optimization | | ryanparrish0 -
Duplicate pages
Hi I have recently signed up to Moz Pro and the first crawl report on my wordpress site has brought up some duplicate content issues. I don't know what to do with this data! The original page : http://www.dwliverpoolphotography.co.uk/blog/ and the duplicate content page : http://www.dwliverpoolphotography.co.uk/author/david/ If anyone can point me to a resource or explain what I need to do thanks! David.
On-Page Optimization | | WallerD0 -
Can you canonical from one domain page to a different domain page
We are a boating site and have our main site with all it's products. We have an engine section within our main site. But we also have an outside domain, specific to a certain manufacturer of engines. So we want our customers to still find the engine information for this manufacturer within our main site, as well as find the manufacturer targeted engine site in the SERPS. My question is this: Can I canonical those pages within our main site to pages on the outside domain? Or does are canonicals to be used only within the same domain? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | tdawson090 -
Too many on page links
Hello, I have a page that isn't ranking very well. http://nicontrols.com/uk/drives-motors/variable-speed-drives According to the MOZ research tools I have too many on page links. I believe most of these are a result of the advanced filtration options on the left hand side of the page. I don't want to remove the filters as they are extremely useful for customers but I am also worried about the number of links Anyone get any ideas about the number of links? Should I care?
On-Page Optimization | | DavidLenehan0 -
Why a page with an On Page A grade has a less good rank than a page with a F grade?
Why a page with an On Page A grade is ranked 17 in Google when the home page with a F grade is ranked 9 ? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Amadeus_eBC0