Site Navigation- Linking back to home Page

Is using Image links bad, should they be text only

[schalk]

We have a shoppingmall web site, with many product pages, each page has links back to the home page and links back to pages with related products and brands.

But we primarily use image links to achieve this. Is google penalising me for this, and should they really be text?

[WiseWebDude]

Well I don't think Google penalizes you for that...HOWEVER, do you have alt image tags set up for those images? It is always better to use TEXT, but if you do use images, add the alt image tags and that works very well as that's what I do and Google loves it. I am TOP ranking on almost all of my terms (I use images with alt tags).

google picks up my links perfectly, just as if they were text due to those tags.

[decaff]

A note on the link back to the home page...
This should, ideally, be formatted like the following for each and every link on your site that references the root home page:
http://www.example.com/ <= with the slash...leave off any reference to whatever file extension you are using (index.php, index.htm, index.html, default.asp, default.aspx, index.cfm...etc..)

This way the engines always see this link referencing one page...if you have a mix of the .com/ and then .com/index.html..etc.....the engines actually see this as two separate pages (off course they point to the same content...which could cause you problems..)

I always work for text links ..(CSS can spruce things up nicely)....I want the spiders to always find the actual HREF ... the ALT="" attribute has it's place...but not as immediate and powerful as an absolute HREF...

You can even use this same technique for sub-directories...

[schalk]

Thanks for the feedback.

We do have alt tags in use for the images, so maybe I shouldn't worry too much.
I have also recently sorted out the issue where we were linking back to home page url default.asp, instead of /