Site Identity Icon

[Clare Bowen]

Sometimes when surfing on one site, I'll see different site identity icons in my browser. Sometimes they seem to match another site, owned by someone else.

 

For example, today I am surfing at a traffic exchange, and its site identity icon is the same as the usual one for Ant Surf.

 

I assume there is a reason (benefit) for doing this. Is it SEO related? Or?

 

Just curious if anyone knows because we have a WP site which allows a site identity icon.

[Guest mrclean0325]

Depending on how the site was coded, your browser may just be using one from your cache that has the same file name as the other site. Clear your cache and see if it stays the same or changes. In other words they could have the same file name and the browser is using the one it already has instead of downloading the other one. Web browser do this to save you bandwidth and render the page faster.

 

If it stays the same, one site may have "borrowed" the image from the other site or used the same programmer and he got confused and put the wrong image. Of course they could be doing it on purpose as some people don't give a crap about someones intellectual property, but I try to go with the other options first...

[Clare Bowen]

oooh, lol, thank you     There was one site that was doing it every few days with familiar icons, or maybe it was my browser as you say. Its not anymore though. It stopped doing that. And the one from yesterday disappeared not long after asking this question. Trust me to see any irregularity and let my curiosity run with it   

[randomcash]

Or they are probably using the same image. They googled for some favicon images and picked up the first one.

[rpsmith]

THanks guys. I have wondered that myself. Is this true for sites that belong to the same family?

[Bruno Duarte]

I know that my site has the same favicon as others I see online. They are likely made by the same developer so I believe many headers have the same coding. Non the less, one can just head on to the file where its encoded and just replace with a more personal one. But who has the time for that? not me....

[weblord]

it's a favicon.ico somewhat distinguishes one website from another. for me it's another form of branding your website

 

There are no direct SEO or ranking effects of having favicons. ... So, if having a favicon next to your website title on browser tabs, on bookmarks, on history archives and so on, helps a user save time, identify and browse your website without difficulties, they may have a rather minuscule but noteworthy role in SEO.

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