: Is having a 'home' navigation item on the home page negative to your sites SEO? Possible Duplicate: Do search engines penalise ‘Home’ links and/or buttons? My work colleague has
Possible Duplicate:
Do search engines penalise ‘Home’ links and/or buttons?
My work colleague has recently had conversations with some SEO consultants and after those conversations she has come to the conclusion that having a link to the home page on the home page will have a negative effect on the websites SEO.
And because of this we are now building websites that don't have a home link show until you are on any page other than the home page.
If the above argument is true then surely then if we are on the about page of a website we shouldn't show a navigation item for the page we are on, and that would the case for any other page of the website...
So my question is:
Does having a home navigation item on the home page have a negative effect on the websites SEO?
And if not:
Why has my colleague come to the above conclusion? Could she be misunderstanding something more important about home links on the home page regarding SEO?
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4 Comments
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I've never heard of such a thing, but in any case, I think that having a primary navigation that changes on different pages could confuse users and negatively impact usability. Users reference the primary navigation as an anchor, to help them understand what the site has to offer. If they're on one page, and there's no link home, and then another page (as you logically suggest if the principle is not to have a link to the page one is on) is missing the About link, etc., they could find this disconcerting.
It is bad.
A rule of thumb in Website Usability (hence SEO) is: never have link that does nothing on your page.
This is why on breadcrumbs, the last item is never a link, and this is why the homepage link on the homepage should be only a label and not a link.
It is not a disaster but not good either.
No, you won't have any negative SEO unless you seemingly do this in an irregular fashion. For example, 30 links to your homepage from your homepage~ with only 31 links on your homepage.
From such a linking pattern, it would be quite clear that you are attempting to pervert the natural direction of your sites internal page rank.
To answer your question directly though, no PageRank would be lost from a page linking to itself, however it does have the potential to limit the PageRank that would otherwise have flowed to other pages on your site.
Also, you would really be killing userability in making these adjustments that go against all common sense. What you would suggest is extremely unnatural.
I wouldn't hide navigation links for pages your visitors are on. Build websites for people not robots. Let people know where they are on your site. If you do not have a home link that won't affect your SEO. You do realize most sites which do not have home links in main navigation are 99% of the time linking their logo in the top right to their home page. That itself is technically a link back to the home page.
Look at any website if there's no home link and I browse 10 pages are you really forcing me to hit my back button 10 times to go to your home page? It's not logical. Just tell your partner to look at any website and point one out which does not link to it's home page in either the header navigation, the logo, and or footer.
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