Anchor text in blog boilerplate

[brandonRT]

At the end of our company blog posts, we have a short paragraph about our main service using anchor text linking to the homepage. I read somewhere (but can't for the life of me find it again) that this method can lead to Google ranking these blog posts lower than if they weren't there.

Is there any correlation between internal linking using boilerplate anchor text and lower ranking for those internal pages? I understand that this isn't a top priority as Google is placing less value on anchor text, but don't want to do anything that could potentially hurt, either.

Thanks.

[irvingw]

Well the more links in the blog post pages, the more you are passing that PR to other pages, so not just that link but all other navigation links will add to less PR retained on that page, so consider not overdoing navigational links.

A sidewide footer link with same anchor text is not really good for SEO, so I would suggest variations when you link. Why are you linking to the homepage there though, if you could link to a call to action page like a signup or free demo page for example that might be better than simply taking the user back to the homepage.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Is the blog hosted on the same domain as your main website?  Like www.domain.com/blog?

If so, there probably isn't any harm in in unless you have thousands of blog posts.  In reality, though, I would vary up the tag.  It can get old for your readers, as well as the robots.  If your blog is hosted off site, though, things change a bit.

Things to consider, though:

• What % does this make up of the content on the page?

• Does this cause your pages to have an enormous amount of the exact match internal link?

• Would my readers want to see this every week/day/hour?

[TakeshiYoung]

I'm sure people on this forum can come up with plenty of theories, but the easiest way to get a definitive answer is to test it.

Remove the anchor text for a few weeks, and see if rankings change, then add it back in again and see if there is an impact. My guess is that a small change like this won't move the needle either way, but if you want to obsess over the small details test it and see what happens.

For bonus points, add Google Analytics tracking code and see if anyone even clicks on the link. If the users aren't clicking on it, then it makes sense to go ahead and remove it.