Member's Badge as Link Building to Homepage or Internal Pages?

[designquotes]

Providing members and embeddable badge is a well known link building tactic. Is it better to have the badges from hundreds or even thousands of members link back to the homepage of a website, or a lot of different inner pages?

The inner pages would the their individual's profile which sits under a category (such as a service and organisation by location).

Member's websites would be related to the content of the website generally.

What are the advantages of each?

1. Links to homepage make it easier to rank for competitive keywords on the homepage?

If the types of websites were to vary a lot, say a carpet cleaning website and a web designer website, if they all linked to the homepage, would it cause some confusion for the link profile?

[MarketingOfAmerica]

Great question...

This question has been questioned by many SEO experts themselves for a long time.  Some SEO firms like beanstalk or other very reputable older firms have footer links still from every client they have ever worked for.  Many of these firms are ranking on the first page for terms like SEO services which is a very competitive term.  Hence, they don't all have relevant links to their site.

I think what you mainly have to worry about is where is your link being placed.  Is it a low quality website?  If you woke up one morning and 1000 people posted your link on 1000 domains with DA's that were 9 and they had no intentions of trying to raise their website ever, you would most likely be in some trouble.

It also all depends on what types of links these will be.  You talked about a badge then anchor text, which will this be? Will you be placing anchor text on a page, or will it be some type of image?  I am a bit confused about this part..

There are many variables that we would have to know to correctly answer this question.  What type of service will you be offering?  Would adult sites be able to post this link on their page?  Casino sites, etc.. Who would want to post this?

To answer your question about home page or inner page, this would be both.  You want your DA to increase for your full site and if you just build to 1 page, it will increase your PA  a lot, but wouldn't help your DA much.

Have a great night, I hope this helped some.

[designquotes]

Thanks for the response.

The badge would be a graphic with ALT text.

Member's would post this badge on their own website as a way of showing they are a member (a bit like the old seomoz badge), so the websites will be varying degrees of quality.

I imagine there would be similar ALT text penalties as there are anchor text penalties if there are too many focused on commercial keyword.

So perhaps it's best if the images point to the member's profile page with their own brand name in the ALT text along with some target keywords. E.g. "Brand Name Carpenter in Location".