Footer link to home page?

[Bandicoot]

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?

[YannickVeys]

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.

[Bandicoot]

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.

[YannickVeys]

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.

[Bandicoot]

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.

[JohnParker2792]

I wouldn't put links to your own brand name in the footer.... more like in the header or horizontal navigation.

[EricaMcGillivray]

I'd be careful about hiding text. Google doesn't like that.

[Bandicoot]

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.

[Bandicoot]

agreed Erica

[YannickVeys]

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