That is like saying ” Sign the contract first, then we will let you read it.

The argument put fourth is that you will convert a higher percent of traffic by being on page four then being on page 1. However, the only reason someone would be looking on page 4 is if;

A. They couldn’t find what they were looking for on page 1, 2 or 3.

C. They are the competition and are just checking out the competition.

The fact is that many SEO’s can’t rank you on page 1 so it is better to try and sale you on the illusion that page 4 rankings are better than page 1 rankings.

Take a look at the clickthrough as a % of the TOTAL clickthroughs for a search term:

#1: Will receive 42.3%
#2: Will receive 11.92%
#3: Will receive 8.44%
#4: Will receive 6.03%
#5: Will receive 4.86%
#6: Will receive 3.99%
#7: Will receive 3.37%
#8: Will receive 2.98%
#9: Will receive 2.83%
#10: Will receive 2.79%

Before you buy SEO from a company that is trying to sale you on how good it is to be on page 4, take a look at the above numbers and ask yourself how much traffic you will be missing out on by not being number 1 on page 1.

Oh…and to give you an idea of that the top of page to looks like, on average it only receives about 0.66% of the total clickthrough’s.

If you want to be a bottom feeder, feeding off what others have left behind then go for the top of page 4, otherwise to succeed you need position one, page one.

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.

If someone goes to a forum about search engine optimization and asks a question about search engine optimization, why is it that some want to-be SEO always shows up and start talking about usability issues?

It’s not a usability question and it wasn’t posted in a usability forum.

The only reason I can see a SEO answering it as usability issues instead of a SEO issue is because he doesn’t know the answer from an SEO point of view.