Are My footer links bad?

[DoRM]

I started working here recently, they said the footer links were to help with navigation of their most popular products.  I am curious after reading http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond  if having these footer links could hurt the ranking of those key words after the penguin update.  I am looking more into the analytics, and have not seen a negative impact yet.

[SanketPatel]

Ok Dorm i will answer you there.

[DoRM]

Thanks,

I just sent you a private message about it.  Please let me know if you have any more questions.

[SanketPatel]

Hi Dorm

Footer links or the interlinking are only for the end user navigation helps so if user likes it or use it then google will also likes it. Your homepage are very much interlinked with lots of keywords under the section "Popular Motorcycle, ATV, Dirt Bike, UTV Parts and Accessories" which are not good according to my experience. Brand section on the homepage are OK. Its good if you only give a link on brand name itself instead of keywords for JakeWilson.com. Also there is no need of putting "Take a look at our most popular areas" section in footer.

Also i would suggest you to put Title tag with 10 - 60 characters, no special characters.

If you need more help for any suggestions then you can PM me or ask here.

[DoRM]

So if we have another site focused on one section of our business and it links to our mains site you would advise not to have it in the footer unless it is a now follow?

[Debdulal]

_What I believe is that if the purpose of keeping links in the footer is to make it easier for your visitors to find related information, keep it. It is not going to hurt you. Just keep the number to a logical limit and you will just be fine. However, to be on the safe side, if you are cross linking, you can add “nofollow” attribute against the links. _

[DoRM]

I know some that having to many exact anchor text is bad; however, having them in the footer of the site i thought did not matter as much, and google knows they are a footer link and to not give them to much value.

Thoughts?

[irvingw]

Pointing to other sites is just leaking PR to those sites and taking users off of your site and onto theirs. Might want to find out their reasoning behind doing that.

Keep in mind that your footer links are global so adding the main target to each of the links can cause an over optimization issue. For example:

hefty brand garbage bags

glad garbage bags

noname garbage bags

etc. too much repetition of "garbage bags in anchor texts globally could trigger a ranking suppression for that main keyword.

[DoRM]

They have about 10 of their most popular and another 8 pointing to their other sites most popular too.

[CaseyKluver]

How many links are in your footer? If there are 30+ I would try trimming it down a bit, anything less you should be fine. But ask yourself this: Is every footer link you have benefitting the user of the website? If not, get rid of them. If you are using your footer links as an SEO tactic, you should probably take a step back and re-think your strategy.

Footer links in my opinion are perfectly fine when used in moderation and they provide value to the user.