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
-
How to write blogs around a page you want to rank
Hey Moz Crew! So I'm not necessarily looking for the answer here but more of a where do I begin to learn more. If you guys could point me in the right direction or even just help me ask the question in a better way, I would be so thankful. Ok so there is page on my website that lives on the second page of Google. The page could be modified and I could add content to it if I wanted to, but let's just assume that this page is perfectly optimized with absolutely wonderful content and a great user experience. Now of course I would like to get a bunch of links to that page, but If I can't write anymore content on that page or update it, It will be harder to convince people to link to it (does that even make sense?). But if I can write blogs about really good subjects around that page, and those blogs do very well, how can I make sure that the actually page is getting all the juice that it can. And will it even get juice? Is this just a simple internal linking question? Am I tapping on the door of micro sites or landing pages? Oy vey where do I start!? ❤ Much love guys 🙂
Technical SEO | | Meier0 -
Joomla creating duplicate pages, then the duplicate page's canonical points to itself - help!
Using Joomla, every time I create an article a subsequent duplicate page is create, such as: /latest-news/218-image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface and /component/content/article?id=218:image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface The latter being the duplicate. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, but the canonical tag on the duplicate is pointing to itself.. creating mayhem in Moz and Webmaster tools. We have hundreds of duplicates across our website and I'm very concerned with the impact this is having on our SEO! I've tried plugins such as sh404SEF and Styleware extensions, however to no avail. Can anyone help or know of any plugins to fix the canonicals?
Technical SEO | | JamesPearce0 -
Duplicate Page Content but where?
Hi All Moz is telling me I have duplicate page content and sure enough the PA MR mT are all 0 but it doesnt give me a link to this content! This is the page: http://www.orsgroup.com/index.php?page=Scanning-services But I cant find where the duplicate content is other than on our own youtube page which I will get removed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnjh9jkAWuA Can anyone help please? Andy
Technical SEO | | ORS-Group0 -
How to Delete a Page on the Web?
Google reports and I have confirmed that the following old page is presenting on the Web. http://www.audiobooksonline.com/The_Great_American_Baseball_Box_Greatest_Moments_from_the_Last_80_Years_original_audio_collection_compact_discs.html This page hasn't been in our site's directory for some time and is no longer needed by us. What is the best way to fix this Google reported crawl error?
Technical SEO | | lbohen0 -
Is it better to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Is it better for SEO to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Technical SEO | | CustomOnlineMarketing0 -
New Domain Page 7 Google but Page 1 Bing & Yahoo
Hi just wondered what other people's experience is with a new domain. Basically have a client with a domain registered end of May this year, so less than 3 months old! The site ranks for his keyword choice (not very competitive), which is in the domain name. For me I'm not at all surprised with Google's low ranking after such a short period but quite surprsied to see it ranking page 1 on Bing and Yahoo. No seo work has been done yet and there are no inbound links. Anyone else have experience of this? Should I be surprised or is that normal in the other two search engines? Thanks in advance Trevor
Technical SEO | | TrevorJones0 -
Removing pages from website
Hello all, I am fairly new to the SEOmoz community. But i am working for a company which organizes exhibitons, events and training in Holland. A lot of these events are only given ones ore twice and then we do not organise them any more because they are no longer relevant. Every event has its own few webpages which provide information about the event and are being indexed by Google. In the past we did not remove any of these events. I was looking in the CMS and saw a lot of events of 2008 and older which are being indexed. To clean the website and the CMS i am thinking of removing these pages of old events. The risk is that these pages have some links to them and are getting some traffic, so if i remove them there is a risk of losing traffic and rankings. What would be the wise thing to do? Make a folder with archive or something? Regards, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
What should i do with the links for "Login", "Register", "My Trolley" links on every page.
My website ommrudraksha has 3 links on every page. 1. Login 2. Register 3. My trolley My doubt is i do not want to give any weightage to these links. does these links will be calculated when page links are calculated ? Should i remove these as links and place these as buttons ? ( with look a like of link visually ? )
Technical SEO | | Ommrudraksha0