How Will Changing Home Page Anchor Text Affect Rankings?

...should I ty it?

[sandpetra]

I'm thinking about renaming my home page with my main keyword (which is the exact name of my product and site).

I'm questioning the usability of it (perhaps I could use the title attribute "home" but at the moment I have hundreds of pages with the keyword "home" pointing to my home page and I wonder what effect i would see?

Would I risk current positions and even supplemental for such a site wide anchor text change to an important page?

Crap idea?

[AndyA]

I would do it slowly if you decide to do it. Just do a small percentage of the links at a time. You might do OK if you're slow about it.

I renamed a link going to my "Main Contents" page a few months back. It was descriptive to humans, but to SEs I felt it didn't really indicate the true nature of the destination page. So, I changed it to "Main Contents" and did it all at once.

My site has been in an up and down mode ever since. I'm not sure if the link anchor text change made any difference, but I'm thinking it didn't help either. If I had to do it over again, I would have done 10% of the links, then waited for those pages to get cached, then do another 10%, etc. Who knows, at some point you may actually determine there's a benefit to not having them all have the same anchor text.

[Alex70]

If you have 20 pages website and you have 200 IBl's maybe is fine, but if yuor site has 5000 pages and all of them link back to your homepage, well it is a very big risk.

[sandpetra]

I might give it a try with my dynamic pages first (about 1/3rd of the site)....

[tedster]

I heard several reports last year of lost rankings on the very keyword used in this kind of change -- so do be cautious. It seems like the trigger might have been the fact of a change, because sites that were launched with this kind of home page linking continued to do OK.

[steveb]

Changing the link text from something useless to anything positive will almost always help. God bless those stuck in the 20th century who still use "home" as link text, but with anything on a website, fixing mistakes should be your priority if your website is designed for the long haul.

"Would I risk current positions and even supplemental for such a site wide anchor text change to an important page?"

Appropriate link text will help you, and pages don't go supplemental due to link text for a page.

[amb7]

Is a webpage made of supper thin glass ready to break at any change?
No - the idea of making a site-wide change for an alt tag which reads HOME one day and YOUR KEYWORD the next day can not possibly change anything in a negative way! What would matter would be to add site-wide links on all pages on the same day or to make major changes in your meta description tags on the same day.

The only way that you could face a problem is if you are "only" changing this - in other words NEXT TIME YOU ADD CONTENT make this change. Do not just change the alt tag - add to the site as well images, words, etc.

[karmov]

Is a webpage made of supper thin glass ready to break at any change?

I think this is a great quote.

While there's certainly nothing wrong at all with asking questions and learning from the experience of others, there are a lot of variables at play on any given website. The only real way to know is to try.

[myvoice]

I ve changed the home page anchor text and few other changes in internal pages and now I am seeing the pages relieved from supplemental index, the site being an affiliate site.

[Oliver Henniges]

It seems to me the trend goes rather more towards phrases or key-phrases instead of words or key-words. What about distributing the most relevant key-phrases of your front-site in general over all you web-pages as link-anchor-text? If you were doing this phrase by phrase over a longer time-period, I see no reason why this should trigger any filter.

[awall19]

I think it depends on how authoritative your site is, how natural your link profile is, and how aligned your inbound anchor text / internal anchor text / page title are.

If you are not that aggressive yet it may help, but if you were already quite aggressive with your anchor text and your link profile is somewhat unnatural I probably would not push it too hard (or if you do be ready to change it back if it causes bad things to happen).

[Sweet Cognac]

I don't have any pages that link to a home or index page. They all link back to mydomain.com/