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You May Be Screwing Yourself With Hyperlinked Headers
SEO News Source: http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com
Published: Oct 09, 2007 - 01:18 pm
Story Found By: mvandemar 2050 Days ago
Category: SEO
If you are like me, then you probably link your header images to your homepage. However, a recent experiment I conducted has me rethinking that particular habit.
 Comments7 Comments  

Comments

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from ANOnym 2050 Days ago #
Votes: 0

No, I am not. I have a pure text theme :) One more reason to love it, I guess (apart from site speed/crawlability).

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from earlpearl 2050 Days ago #
Votes: 0

That is a nice test and an interesting result.  I have generated multiple links on a page to the same singular page, both internal and external in different examples.  Its very worthwhile to see this fully reviewed.  Per this analysis the first link is the only one that shows.  That implies an important and critical value to the first link.  I’d love to hear confirming or contrasting experience with this.

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from g1smd 2050 Days ago #
Votes: 1

Hmm. Another reason to have that header link not as the first code seen on the page, and then visually positioned at the top of the page using CSS.

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from JohnWeb 2050 Days ago #
Votes: 1

I love experiments, it shows some thought rather than just the theory.  Anchor text of course is a good thing, though I’ve seen people take it the other direction with basically a sitemap on their sidebar and way too many keywords used as anchor text.  It looks like crap and doesn’t seem to do them much good, may eve be part of that "over optimization" enigma perpetuated by Google. One possible disjoint I see in the experiment is that its based on test with one link to a page.  A "home" link is usually repeated sitewide and probably the most abundant link on the site.  At some point when you’ve got hundreds, thousands, or even more links pointing to one page the effects of anchor text and those links gets watered down.  Another fact to consider is that the deeper pages usually (except those with external links) get their power from the navigation which starts at the home page, links back have minimal effect or else all of our sites would be PR10.But your conclusions I believe are sound, images don’t convey any meaningful data to a ranking algorithim, text does.

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from kichus 2050 Days ago #
Votes: 0

I have tried a similar test in my blog too with the first link with rel="nofollow". Just on curiosity after seeing Pops post at SeoRefugee thread. This was a great insightful thought Michael and thanks for the heads up. :)  

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from g1smd 2050 Days ago #
Votes: 0

A full site-map as left side-bar navigation really does cause a problem.  Changing it to only link to section indexes and to other lower pages in the same section has made quite a difference in a couple of sites I have recently looked at. 

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from daamsie 2050 Days ago #
Votes: 1

Interesting experiment. A follow-up suggestion; if that first link were no-followed, would the second link then become the one that passes anchor text kudos?Also, to avoid using an image + alt text for your header, instead you should use a plain text link and then use CSS image replacement techniques to insert your logo or header image

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