Putting blog excerpts in footer of every page?
-
I have roughly 150 non-blog pages and 500 articles in my blog.
The footer of every non-blog page includes excerpts from 3 blog posts selected at random from the inventory of 500.
The posts in the footer of each page change with every page refresh.
So, if you scroll to the bottom of any non-blog page, you'll see about 85 words for each of 3 randomly selected blog posts, with a link to the source article in the blog section of my site. Each page will link to 3 different posts.
One of my objectives is to drive visitors to some older blog content that has become buried deep in the archives over the years.
Question 1: In a post-Panda/Penguin world, is this a good or bad technique?
Question 2: Should the links to the full content in the blog use rel="nofollow"? Without it, the internal link structure for this part of the site looks pretty crazy and random - I assume nofollow would help make things look more orderly (and prevent my main non-blog pages from passing excess link juice to my blog).
Thoughts or comments?
-
On my site, I have a sidebar widget that links to 10 random pages on my site. I would love to have it link to 10 relevant pages on my site as EGOL suggests...It's on my list of things to program one day!
I do feel that these are helpful to me. The main reason why I like this widget is because I think it helps me keep my pages in Google's index. My site has over 3000 pages and I think many of them would end up in the supplemental index if they were not regularly linked to internally like they are.
Also, I have it set so that they link using my desired anchor text for the page. This may help somewhat in my SERPs for each page.
Oh, and all of these links are followed on my site.
-
I think that 45 words is too much. I would use a title. Or a title and a few words. Or, a title and a sexy sentence.
Last, a new question: Can you think of ANY good reason to put blog excerpts in a site-wide footer the way http://springboard.com/ and http://seoaware.com do?
Yes, but only until I had time to do something better.
-
Thanks for a very thoughtful reply; I agree that it's important to promote the best content, and I definitely do that.
I misspoke earlier - the excerpts are just the title and 45 words, not 85. Maybe 3 sentences. Do you still think this is a duplicate content risk?
Last, a new question: Can you think of ANY good reason to put blog excerpts in a site-wide footer the way http://springboard.com/ and http://seoaware.com do? I currently do it randomly; these other sites excerpt the latest posts.
-
These are in the footer? How many people are going all the way down there and clicking on them? I bet nobody. If nobody is clicking them then why do this?
I would run crazyegg on a few pages to see if anybody is clicking these links.
The footer of every non-blog page includes excerpts from 3 blog posts selected at random from the inventory of 500.
If you really want to get people into these posts your best bet would be to link to relevant rather than random? Don't you think?
Almost any blog that has 500 posts is going to have some really good ones and some real sleepers. I would focus on promoting the really good ones if you want people to click these.
Promote your best. Not random.
So, if you scroll to the bottom of any non-blog page, you'll see about 85 words for each of 3 randomly selected blog posts, with a link to the source article in the blog section of my site. Each page will link to 3 different posts.
Eighty five words for each? Wow... that is a lot... Way more than I would use. How a bout a title and ten words. Nobody is going to read these.
I think that you could run into duplicate content issues with this - even though they are shuffled randomly.
Question 1: In a post-Panda/Penguin world, is this a good or bad technique?
You can see my answers above. I think that the footer is bad location and I think that you should promote your best instead of random.
Question 2: Should the links to the full content in the blog use rel="nofollow"? Without it, the internal link structure for this part of the site looks pretty crazy and random - I assume nofollow would help make things look more orderly (and prevent my main non-blog pages from passing excess link juice to my blog).
I would not use nofollow on links within my own website. When you use nofollow the pagerank that would have flowed into those links evaporates. It is lost. Poof! Instead, allow the pagerank to flow into these pages and out through their links. If you nofollow you cut off the power.
-
Ben,
Thanks for the reply. I didn't know about the nofollow on the internal links.
Yes, the body of every page has unique content.
My entire site revolves around serving the needs of a specific type of individual, and the content in the body and the content in the blog work together to fill the information needs of the visitor - so hopefully yes, the blog content is relevant.
I see lots of websites incorporating a blog excerpt in the footers or sidebars of their pages (e.g., http://springboard.com/ and http://seoaware.com). The problem I have is that they almost always link to the most recent blog post(s), concentrating attention on a small subset of the blog inventory. That means older, still-relevant, still-useful content is getting neglected. That's the main thing I'm trying to overcome.
I do have good site search so people who know what they are looking for can find it - the problem is that many people don't know what they want until they see it.
Thanks again!
-
Question 2 first - I don't think there's any need for the no-follow at all. In fact I'm pretty certain Google have gone on record saying that you'll never need to no-follow with internal links.
Question 1 - If you've got some unique content in the main body of the page I wouldn't foresee it being a problem. However you should probably be asking yourself if it's actually of any use to the user? Is the content you're sending them to relevant to what they're looking for and is it improving their overall experience on your site?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Pricing value pages
We have the main pricing page here: https://www.eginnovations.com/product/pricing Then depending on what you click, you'll be taken to the appropriate form on one of these pages: https://www.eginnovations.com/product/request-quote?pricetype=audit https://www.eginnovations.com/product/request-quote?pricetype=saas https://www.eginnovations.com/product/request-quote?pricetype=perpetual https://www.eginnovations.com/product/request-quote?pricetype=subscription How should I handle these? Noindex, follow? Set a canonical? I keep getting notifications that these are duplicate content, but it's just a way to keep the form fills organized. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | eGInnovations1 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Old Product Pages
Hi Issue: I have old versions of a product page in the Google index for a product that I still carry. Why: The URLs were changed when we updated this product page a few years ago. There are four different URLs for this product -- no duplicate content issues b/c we updated the product info, Title tags, etc. So I have a few pages indexed by Google for a particular product. Including a current, up-to-date page. The old pages don't get any traffic, but if I type in google search: "product name" site:store.com then all of the versions of this page appear. The old pages don't have any links to them, only one has any PA, and as I said they don't get any traffic, and the current page is around #8 in google for its keyword. Question: Do these old pages need 301 redirects, should I ask google to remove the old URLs? It seems like Google picks the right version of this page for this keyword query, is it possible that the existence of these other pages (that are not nearly as optimized for the keyword) drag it down a bit in the results? Thanks in advance for any help
Technical SEO | | IOSC0 -
Translating Page Titles & Page Descriptions
I am working on a site that will be published in the original English, with localized versions in French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. All the versions will use the English information architecture. As part of the process, we will be translating the page the titles and page descriptions. Translation quality will be outstanding. The client is a translation company. Each version will get at least four pairs of eyes including expert translators, editors, QA experts and proofreaders. My question is what special SEO instructions should be issued to translators re: the page titles and page descriptions. (We have to presume the translators know nothing about SEO.) I was thinking of: stick to the character counts for titles and descriptions make sure the title and description work together avoid over repetition of keywords page titles (over-optimization peril) think of the descriptions as marketing copy try to repeat some title phrases in the description (to get the bolding and promote click though) That's the micro stuff. The macro stuff: We haven't done extensive keyword research for the other languages. Most of the clients are in the US. The other language versions are more a demo of translation ability than looking for clients elsewhere. Are we missing something big here?
Technical SEO | | DanielFreedman0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Homepage dropping back to page 30 and being replaced by a random page?
Hi All Please accept my apologies if i have posted this in the wrong place, i am new to this. I have asked for help over and over again on Google Webmaster Forum but everytime i am faced with sarcastic, unhelpful answers and then moaned at for asking the same question again when i get no answers. Well, my website is http://www.hillfieldscampingandleisure.co.uk. The site is nearly 2 years old and is an ecommerce online camping equipment store. It is hosted on the EKMPOWERSHOP Platform. After a about a year of adding products and designing my site i decided to hire an SEO Company based in the UK, they were a good company with some big clients. Anyways to cut a really long story short....they completely ripped me off by £700 a month for 7 months for my site to keep going backwards, they wouldnt target the keywords i wanted and all they did was provide really spammy, non relevant, no page rank links...my site ended up on number 31 of Google. I managed to drop the company and try to do things myself. I optimized my sites content so it wasn't keyword stuffed I re-wrote all my alt tags to look more natural I optimized my meta and h1 tags I carried on with trying to build relevant, high page rank links Anyways i managed to get my homepage to page 3/4 of Google. It stayed there for a few weeks but over the past few weeks my Homepage is dropping back to page 28-30 and being replaced with a random page of my site on page 4-6. It corrects itself after a while and my homepage returns but then it happens all over again....today i have a random page on page 4 and my homepage is on page 29. Any ideas on what is causing this and how can i get my site up there? I have had some ideas come back that it is the EKM platform i am using but since the seo company took the p out of me, its the only one i can afford at the moment until i start selling. I am a small business with stock waiting to be sold but no matter how much i read and rules to follow my site just doesn't seem to move. Any help would be really really apreciated and be nice!
Technical SEO | | hillfields0 -
What's the best way to eliminate duplicate page content caused by blog archives?
I (obviously) can't delete the archived pages regardless of how much traffic they do/don't receive. Would you recommend a meta robot or robot.txt file? I'm not sure I'll have access to the root directory so I could be stuck with utilizing a meta robot, correct? Any other suggestions to alleviate this pesky duplicate page content issue?
Technical SEO | | ICM0 -
404 - page authority?
If in open site explorer my 404 pages have a higer page authority - what benefit would i see in rankings if I 301 redirected those pages to the right page. For example www.site.com/widget is a 404 but has authority according to open site explorer - but the page i see in the serps is www.site.com/widget/ with the / at the end. so what benefit would i see in rankings if I 301 redirected those pages to the right page?
Technical SEO | | DavidS-2820610