5 replies to this topic

[Needahand]

Hi, can anyone tell me if it will help my search engine rankings if I have links going back to my home page (from my own pages) with the anchor text containing my main keyword phrase (for the home page) ie if my home page is optimised for the keyword phase "Costa Blanca Property" would it be likely to improve my search engine ranking for that phrase if the anchor text on links back to my home page have the anchor text "Costa Blanca Property" rather than "home". Thanks in advance for your help.
Needahand

[Christopher]

Hi, can anyone tell me if it will help my search engine rankings if I have links going back to my home page (from my own pages) with the anchor text containing my main keyword phrase (for the home page) ie if my home page is optimised for the keyword phase "Costa Blanca Property" would it be likely to improve my search engine ranking for that phrase if the anchor text on links back to my home page have the anchor text "Costa Blanca Property" rather than "home". Thanks in advance for your help.
Needahand

A better idea would be to put that text on your alt tag of your logo which appears on every page of your site. However it will probably help you to make sure that your link to your home page is the same on all the pages of your site. For example.

http://www.domain.com
http://www.domain.com/
http://www.domain.com/index.php

make sure they are all the same.. I personally prefer http://www.domain.com/

[Jill]

can anyone tell me if it will help my search engine rankings if I have links going back to my home page (from my own pages) with the anchor text containing my main keyword phrase

Yes, it will.

[Needahand]

Ok thanks for your comments, never thought of putting it in img alt tag. I already have 2 links back to my home page from each of my other pages - is this excessive or in any way damaging? I normally have one link saying "home" on the top right hand side, and on new pages I am now putting a link at the bottom with my keyword phrase in it. Previous pages have "home" at the bottom as well - is it worth changing these to my keyword phrase? Finally I would say all of my links back to the home page go to either www.domain.com or www.domain.com/ probably a mix of both do you think this may be a problem?

[Randy]

Finally I would say all of my links back to the home page go to either www.domain.com or www.domain.com/ probably a mix of both do you think this may be a problem?

Normally it's not a problem since servers will usually normalize those two automatically for you. That said, it's a really good idea to be as consistent as possible in how you link to your pages.

As to the other question, there is a theory out there (unproven, but it makes sense) that the engines may simply disregard multiple links from one page to another page. Meaning only the first one may be seen as a real link. Nobody outside of the search engines can tell you if this is the case or not, but it does make some sense.

Given this theory it would make sense to have the first link to your home page be the one that includes your anchor text, rather than having it in the 2nd or 3rd link back to the home page. That's where using an image link can come in quite handy.

[Michael Martinez]

As to the other question, there is a theory out there (unproven, but it makes sense) that the engines may simply disregard multiple links from one page to another page. Meaning only the first one may be seen as a real link. Nobody outside of the search engines can tell you if this is the case or not, but it does make some sense.

Google specifically states that they "normalize" multiple links to the same destination (from the same page). They have not defined normalization.

Normalization could mean 1 of 2 things:

1) You toss out every link after the first

2) You treat all links as if they are one link

You can test for what happens with each search engine by pointing to a page with two unique sets of anchor text. If all the unique text is associated with the destination page, then you know the search engine treats multiple links on a page as if they are one link.

Generally speaking, I usually recommend that people have their Web pages link to the root URL with the most relevant keywords for the main index (which is usually the company name, or the Web site name, etc.). In practice, it's a matter of what you're comfortable showing to your visitors. Yes, the internal links can boost the value of your pages for specific keywords, but keep in mind that once you get people to find your site you need to make sure they can (and feel compelled to) use it.