Should we add a link from every page with main keyword back to homepage

[Richard777]

Dear all,

We have a call for action on the bottom of all our 10K plus pages which has the words private jet charter in it. Here is what the sentence looks like:

Call +1-877-727-2538 to hire private jet charter flights or get a private jet quote

The "private jet charter" link goes to the homepage - the homepage has always ranked for the same keyword. Even though we have a separate page for private jet charter itself which may or may not be competing with homepage for the same keyword.

The question is - does this help our efforts to rank higher for private jet charter or does it not.

It used to be that the more links from all pages for specific keyword coming back to homepage was good - but now maybe algorithms may have changed and not sure.

[chrwald]

Hi,

allthough this might pass some additional linkjuice, this will imho not help you rank better for the used anchor-text since  google only takes the anchortext of the first link to a certain page into account. Since you have already a link with the anchortext "home" in you menu, I think there is no extra effect for using another anchor-text in our footer.

Best regards

[AlJohnson]

If that were true then any link in a guest blog would not be useful. Why would the search engines only look at the first link? Doesn't make sence.

[chrwald]

I was surprised about this by myself. Rand talked about it in January 5th whiteboard friday "all about anchortext".

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/all-about-anchor-text-whiteboard-friday

Quote: "What I want to cover is some intricacies around this, some details that you may or may not know about anchor text, and those include: Number one, multiple anchors from the same page "do not" provide more value."

This still doesnt mean, that two links from let's say page X to page Y are not better then only one link in regard to linkjuice. One could say; "Multiple links from the same page still provide more linkjuice." But in regard to anchortext it's the one of the first "x to y"-link on a given page X which matters for page Y.

If I totaly missunderstood this please take my dearest apologies, as for my "semi-pro" use of the english language.

[AlJohnson]

yeah, you misunderstood.

He's talking about two link with same anchor text. It doesn't help to add more than one link with same anchor.

[chrwald]

hmm, still I beg to differ. Another quote from the same episode:

"Number four, the first anchor text in the HTML of a page is what Google counts, Bing as well. This was discovered on SEOmoz a couple of years ago. We ran some tests about it. We published the results. There was a lot of skepticism. I think Debra Mastaler from Alliance-Link wrote about it and said, "Hey, Matt Cutts, would you please confirm this?" And he did. He came out and said, "Yeah, that's how we interpret it".

So, basically, here's what's going on. If you see a web page and it says this website is awesome, it features highlights of great Portuguese cooks, now look, these two links are both pointing to the same page. [...] That means not that the website is going to get credit for the anchor text website and the anchor text Portuguese cooks, but rather they are going to consider the anchor text website and ignore Portuguese cooks." (if website is the first anchor-text).

[AlJohnson]

we're talking about two different things, you're saying two links to the same page and I'm saying to different links to two different pages.

[randfish]

IMO, those links in the footer do not help with rankings in Google. This is exactly what the "first link counts" anchor text test is about http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts

You almost certainly are already linking to those pages higher up in the HTML, and Google is counting those anchors, and probably discounting the ones in the footer.