I am not sure how people can call themselves SEO’s and not have a clue as to how the search engines work. Understanding the way PR flows throughout a site is an extremely important job that all SEO’s should understand.

As I said before, I don’t visit the forms much but the other day I ran across this post.

Now…the original poster asked a very simple question

Hi I’m trying to decided whether I should have a link to my homepage on my page headers. I suspect it’s fine to just make the logo take clickers through to the homepage without having another tab on the header called ‘home’ which just takes up space. But, I wondered if it might help Google’s bots navigate around my site if I have a home link and therefore help my ranking.

What does everyone think?

thanks,
Steve

The neat thing was all the SEO’s immediately agreed that placing links all over the page and linking it back to the home page wouldn’t hurt your SEO efforts. And what was even neater was that when they were proven wrong they ignored that and went into a usability argument.

I bet they were all Obama supporters.

The problem with having more than one link on a page (that is linking to the same page) is that Google will pick one link and ignore the others. So…we have our logo that can be clicked and takes us back to our home page and then we decide to put another link on the page with our anchor text, not only do we lose the anchor text for the link but the PR is also lost.

Google not only ignores the second link (which test has proven) but according to some statements made by Matt Cutts (that I can not find) the PR for the link that is being ignored evaporates (the way I understand it).

Now, this means that the PR that would have originally been passed back to the home page is less and since it’s a site wide issue (if the site has a lot of pages) we should be able to see the difference in our rankings if the problem is repaired.

Google is always changing the way they rank pages and PR flows, using outdated data and old information will get us into trouble. And if you are going to call yourself an SEO, you should at the very least keep up with how the search engines rank pages.