Footer Links when is it to much?

[PeterRota]

Hi, so iv been searching around the internet, and I have come up with the general consensus that footer links that link to external sites are bad? Can anyone verify this statement? Also when do Footer links become spammy, and what is your opinion on site wide footer links?

I have also read that if you are a bigger brand, that you most likely would be able to get away with some more things(such as, linking to external sites) thanks for your help.

Peter

[TakeshiYoung]

Linking to external sites from a footer is not harmful, unless the sites you are linking to are low quality sites.

What can be harmful is receiving a lot of sitewide footer links with exact keyword anchor text. This can be seen as spammy by Google. Footer links & sitewide links in general also don't carry as much weight as in-context links.

[donford]

Hi Peter,

My opinion on footer links is they should be used for internal site navigation or provide help to the user.  Example when I'm on a site I'm not familiar with, I generally expect to find help/contact us in the footer.

Now linking externally you really need to examine the goal behind this sort of link, because it can not only hurt your site, but add to a potential penalty to the site you're linking to.

It hurts your site in 2 ways, one you are diluting your link juice to your own links by passing it to another site, and secondly because footer links are generally on every page you are kind of spamming the link to the search engine.

Since Google's Panda and Penguin updates sites have been receiving penalties for link over optimizing SEO, which includes anchor text from links. Again since footer links are generally site wide you can really rack up anchor spam for the site you're linking to. Granted this gets into negative SEO and there is debate about how this works, but if its controversial I just tend to stay away from it.

Okay all that said, the answer dependent on whether or not the link is going to be sitewide, if it has value on every page you use it on and the overall purpose of the link. If you want to link to a parent website, or subsidiary website, put the link on appropriate pages instead like about us, or company info. If you are linking to something like blog.mywebsite.com you may want to evaluate moving the blog from sub-domain to a directory inside your site, essentially combining the site into 1. Remember sub-domains are treated as different websites.

Finally to answer your question about bigger websites getting away with this sort of thing. Yes, it is true because despite them not worrying about the search engines, the search engine still worries about them, and if they are the most relevant site, the search engine will still want to show its users (searchers) the most relevant site.

Hope that helps,