Putting No Follow on Home Button

I been receiving a lot of responses from whenever I mention that a website should have a ‘nofollow’ on the home button.

There other links that should carry this attribute, and I wrote more about that on my No Follow Attribute post.

There are some who may disagree with this post, but read the whole post then decide.

Everytime you do something in coding you have to ask “Is this for the robots or humans?”

Obviously placing a No Follow tag or attribute will be for the robots not for humans.

So is the Home button that is found on almost every website for the robots or the humans? The answer is both.

Websites should have two navigations for users. One for the humans, and one for the robots.

If the navigation is bad for the humans, then your users will not find the content they need. They will BOUNCE, and be less likely to come back.

If the navigation is bad for the robots, then your page will suffer in the SERPs. They will also BOUNCE, and be less likely to come back.

So when we look at websites, we have to look at it the way a human would, and how a robot will view it.

The Home button may look like an ordinary button to a human, but a robot views it as a link WITH an Anchor text.

This link is on every page of your website, AND you’re telling the robot that your homepage has the anchor text of ‘Home’.

That’s a bad idea because our home page should be name after a keyword like SEO Blog. (check my footer)

This is the SAME principle of removing the word Home from the Meta Tag Title. When you first broadcasted your site you would’ve remembered that the name of the page was called Home or Default. You quickly removed it, and placed a keyword in its place. You did this for the robots, and not for the humans. Nothing really changed except the robots can properly identify your page(s).

So should you change your Home button name with a keyword? That’s not a good idea because you want your users to be able to find the homepage.

So now you’re asking these two questions
So what should you do after placing the nofollow attribute on the Home button?
How will the robots find my Home page?

Easy. Place a link to your home page on your footer that actually contains a keyword that identifies your homepage.
The footer appears on every page in your website….just like the home button.

I have seen a lot of people utilize the footer in this way but forget to add the nofollow on the Home button.
That’s 1 link with a keyword, and another link (home button) with the wrong keyword. That’s a waste of juice!

Here’s how to change it in WP
Go to the Header file, and go to this line, and insert the nofollow
rel=”nofollow” href=”?php echo get_settings(‘home’); ?”Home