Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Do we have too many links in our footer?
-
Hi guys, we have 41 links on our holiday(vacation) rental website, this seems too many when looking at best practice. 24 of these are links to community pages while 8 link to activities pages. The community and activity pages are also accessible from links on the top menu so they are not strictly necessary but do get 10% of site clickthroughs according to Google in-page analytics. I therefore do not want to remove the links if there is no good evidence that google will penalize us for this. What do you think would be best for our site? Thanks, John Tulley.
-
Hi,
Yes the footer links are sitewide.
** Then I am sure those are not all 100% relevant for every page and you are spliting the Page Rank juice / equity / votes to all of the pages linked for all pages.
I would suggest to keep in the footer:
-
links that user can actually click on and links to releveant pages vs the pages they are placed on
-
links that are not in the page (menu, body, side bars etc)
Yes all the links (apart from the corporate links are duplicated in the menubar under the page header.
** They it will make sense to keep there only the ones that are really important not all of them. And again, like stated above, you are spliting the votes to all links per page no matter what if the links are duplicated or not. More then that the anchor text of the footer links won't matter anyway as only the first one is taken in consideration and since the other are above those will be considered.
-
-
I'd be wary of that community page, however it's extremely unlikely that one page will have a negative impact across the whole website, so it's not a high priority
As mentioned below, reducing the footer on internal pages might be an option?
-
Hi eyepaq,
Thanks for the reply,
Yes the footer links are sitewide.
Yes all the links (apart from the corporate links are duplicated in the menubar under the page header.
Do you then recommend just having the corporate links in the footer?
-
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the reply, most of our property pages have between 110 and 140 links per page. Our community pages may be a problem as they list each property on a community and for each property there is 5 image links and 2 text links. One community page lists 28 properties and that page has a total of 305 links.
-
Hi,
For sure you won't get a penalty for having too many links in the footer. More then that you don't have that many anyway.
Is this footer site wide ? ( on all pages of the site ). A good idea is to have a more heavy footer on the home page only and have a more dedicated version on the inner pages.
Are those link also available in the body of the page / pages since you do have some clicks on those but GA shows the links CTR overall not per individual links so that means maybe the users are not actually clicking on the links in the fotter if those are also available in the header, body side bars etc.
If yes, that will "harm" you in the way that you split all internal link equity to all links per page including those in the footer - so as far as structure is not really a good idea as I am sure some pages that are linked from your pages - all around - including the footer are more important then others but you are actually diluting those "votes" by having that many links per page all around.
Again, the bottom line is that there is no way you will get a penalty but:
-
google might not follow all links if you don't have enough authority
-
some of your important pages won't get the needed "attention" due to the fact that you are linking to that many pages from all pages of your site.
-
-
John,
41 links for a footer area, whilst it is a large number, isn't too many really. You should be careful on the total number of links on the page however. I believe you should try to cap it at 100, but I think I've read somewhere 200+ is classed excessive
Hope this helps!
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
-
Too much internal linking?
Hi everyone, Too much of anything is not good. In terms of internal linking, how many are too many? I read that the recommended internal links are about 100 links per page otherwise it dilutes the page's link equity. I have a concern about one of our websites - according to search console, the homepage has 923 internal links. All the pages have a corresponding /feed page added to the page URL, which is really weird (is this caused by a plugin?). The site also has an e-com feature, but it is not used as the site is essentially a brochure and customers are encouraged to visit the shop. I assume the e-com feature also increases this number. On the other hand, one of the competitors we are tracking has 1 internal link site-wide. Ours is at 45,000 site-wide. How is it possible to only have 1 internal link? Is this a Moz bug? I know we also need to reduce our internal links badly, however, I'm not sure where to start. I don't know how these internal links are linked together - some aren't in the copy or navigation menu. When I scan the homepage links using 'check my links', the total links identified for the homepage is only 170. kAeYlTM
On-Page Optimization | | nhhernandez0 -
How many hyphens are allowed in page titles or image names?
When I was going through certification, I was told it should be limited to one or two. I was curious if there is a change.
On-Page Optimization | | SeobyKP0 -
Do Search Engines Try To Follow Phone Number Links
Any SEO thoughts on using rel="nofollow" when inserting a link to a phone number? To make a phone number click to call we use (555) 555-1234 Wondering if search engines are trying to follow that link or if this is standard and not to worry. Any thoughts on if I should add rel="nofollow" to these or does it not matter? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Lions-Pro0 -
Linking to External Site In Nav Bar
Hi, we are a celebrity site but also own a separate sports site with its own URL. We have a link to that site in our Nav bar. Are we being penalized by having that link? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Uinterview0 -
How many product subcategories are ok?
Let's say I have a sea glass ankle bracelet. On my site, my main keyword is "Sea Glass Jewelry" and have ranked relatively well for this, but this main page has over 200 products in it. I thought that if the URL has the keywords in it, it would be beneficial. I also have a section for all my bracelets, so it would be there and then, a more specific ankle bracelets category. So, technically, an ankle bracelet will show up 3x. Sea Glass Jewelry (all products go here) Bracelets (all bracelets go here) Ankle Bracelets (only ankle bracelets) The URL is only attached to the main category so to speak. If you click the ankle bracelets category, the url will still revert back to the original main category: seaglassjewelry/sterlinganklebracelet so I don't believe there is duplicate content. I have had my domain for years and it has ranked well until someone hacked into my site 2 years back. I have never been able to recover from this loss. Since then, I have tried to optimize my site, but nothing seems to be working and I just want to make sure that I am not hurting my ranking by doing this. Can someone confirm this is the best way to do it or make a suggestion? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | tiffany11030 -
Reducing number crawl-able links?
Hello, I just like to ask for best practice when it comes to reduce number of internal links on a site with a mega menu. Since the mega menu lists all categories and all their subcategories it creates a problem when all categories are linking to all categories directly.. Would the method below reduce the number of links and preventing the link juice flowing directly from category to category? [(link built with JavaScript and the html5 "data-" attribute) Thinking of using these links to categories in the menu not directly below the parent category.](#)
On-Page Optimization | | AJPro0 -
Ecommerce - how many clicks from the home page should categories be
My client has about 300 products in 20 categories with a lot of overlap. How many clicks from the home page should we keep the products? We're not doing pagination. I'd been told several years ago that all products should be 2 clicks or less from the home page. Is this true today? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW1 -
How many keywords max can I optimize each page for?
I don't want to over optimize by doing 1 keyword per 1 page, but then if I do more, seomoz on-page tool report doesn't give an A grade for each keyword I optimize. I usually optimize for max 3 keywords that are very closely related, meaning they use the same words. Ex. dentist los angeles, los angeles dentist, dentist in los angeles Am I on the right track or what's your recommendation? Should I create different landing pages for each keyword?
On-Page Optimization | | sub90900
