10 replies to this topic

[Louisa]

Hi,

My site has a french and an english version. My main page (www.mydomain.com) establishes a link towards each version with the logo of the company but whitout html links and text. We have put, of course, an alternate tag on the logo wich links to www.mydomain.com/index.jsp for the french version and "http://www.mydomain....lish/index.jsp" for the english version. Could this affect my ranking? Would it be better to put a html link with the company name? Or even forget this main page?

Thanks in advance.

Louisa

[Jill]

Welcome, Louisa!

It doesn't matter whether you use an image link or a text links. The search engines can follow either and should index both versions fine.

Jill

[SearchRank]

It sounds like you have some kind of a splash page that then links to either version of the site. I would add html links in addition to links behind the logos. Google especially states that there must be at least one html text link to each page of the site in their Webmaster Guidelines. It seems that their spider favors crawling html text links opposed to graphical links.

However, from an SEO standpoint, it is better to not have a splash page at all but rather allow the main English page to be your home page and then give the end user the option of seeing the site in French as well.

[fred]

Hi

Searchrank is right about removing the splash page and Jill is right about the spidering of your site.

as long as your web site content is optimized you should get some visitors.

I would remove the splash page, as for setting the english page as the main page , it depends on your business will you attract more french on english visitors ?

Go with the one that will attract the most

p.s. hey what happened to the spell check ?

[Scottie]

Sorry Fred- I accidentally overwrote it last weekend. Will get it put back today!

It's still there on Fast Reply if you need it now...

[Jill]

Google especially states that there must be at least one html text link to each page of the site in their Webmaster Guidelines. It seems that their spider favors crawling html text links opposed to graphical links.

David, an image link that has the usual <a href> IS an html link. Google has absolutely no problem following these. If they did, 3/4 of the websites out there wouldn't be getting spidered!

I have to disagree that google favors crawling text links over graphical links. It certainly shouldn't make a difference to them in the least, when it comes to crawling.

Jill

[qwerty]

It would make sense that spiders can follow a straightforward image link as easily as a text link, but for some reason Google does stipulate the following right at the beginning of their webmaster guidelines:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

[Jill]

Well, that may have nothing to do with crawling. They might prefer a text link because it describes the page better than an image will. This will help them determine relevancy.

Since that section of the guidelines is talking about design and content, I would imagine that's what they're talking about.

When I said image links are just as crawlable as text links, that's what exactly what I meant. If we're going to talk about which are better for SEO purposes, it's a different answer.

But for crawlability, either of them are perfectly fine, and that's what we (or at least I) was talking about, because David said that they were less crawlable (they're not).

Jill

[SearchRank]

When I said image links are just as crawlable as text links, that's what exactly what I meant.

But for crawlability, either of them are perfectly fine, and that's what we (or at least I) was talking about, because David said that they were less crawlable (they're not).

I actually said "It seems that their spider favors crawling html text links opposed to graphical links." It didn't mean to say that graphical links are less crawlable than text links. The reason I made reference to Google favoring text links over graphic links arose out of an email I sent to them where I inquired about a site having a 0 PR ranking. I had asked if the site was being penalized or something and pointed out that while it wa in their index for quite some time, it had had a PR ranking of 0 for over a year.

This was their reply:

Thank you for your note. It appears that our robot is not currently
indexing all of your pages. Because our robot has not crawled some of your
pages, it cannot assign an accurate PageRank. Here is some information
that may help you improve your site's visibility to our robot and hence
your PageRank.

Now that's a fairly generic response so I went to the Webmaster Guidelines link they provided and right there on the top was that statement "Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link." So I then went and looked at the home page of the site in question and there was not one html text link, only graphical links. So I wondered, are text links that important to Google that they will not crawl a site if they do not find any on the home page? At any rate we added text links to the bottom and are now waiting to see if the site gets crawled and if the PR ranking changes. This is the first time I have ever come across this because I have never worked on a home page before that did not have both graphical and text links.

Therefore it is my opinion that you should have both, at least on the home page for the sake of Google. Possibly this is a isolated incident for this site only - I don't know. We shall see.

[Jill]

Definitely let us know if it makes a difference, David! There are really such huge implications for Google telling people stuff like that.

Why don't they just go back in time and tell everyone their page needs to be designed as if it were 1995!

J

[SearchRank]

Oh I'm watching it daily.

Google currently has three pages of the site indexed out of a possible 22 with a PR of 0. I was shocked at their response but relieved that the site was not being penalized. I had never come across this that I can recall because usually a site has some text links at the bottom or in the copy but this one did not have any on the home page at least, just graphical buttons.

It would be interesting to know if anyone else on this forum has dealt with home pages that have no html text links and has had no issues with Google crawling and rating the site.