Do the external links at footer menu take away PR or Linkjuice?
-
Hi all,
We have some external links on our footer menu. I'm just trying to figure out whether these take away pagerank. What if they are follow or nofollow? How fair to have DMCA badge with link at footer? Will this hurts?
Thanks
-
No question - the page's authority is divided up amongst all links on the page, not just the internal ones. That's why I made the recommendation I did.
To be clear - you're not "losing Pagerank" for the page that contains the links. You're losing the ability of that page to pass some of it's power to other pages on your own site, by having that power sent to external sites instead.
Paul
-
Hi Paul,
Thanks for the response and such detailed answer. One thing I would like to know is, we are clear that the pagerank or authority will be divided for the number of internal pages. Will it be the same case with external links too as you mentioned? I agree that some authority will be added to the external page we are linking....does that really means we are loosing some? I have seen here from other SEOs that we are not going to loose any pagerank with external linking.
Thanks
-
Further to Patrick's point, remember that a page passes its authority to other pages by dividing up the page's "power" (ranking authority, or your term Pagerank) and distributing it relatively evenly through all the outgoing links on the page. So if you have a bunch of links to external sites, you're sending a significant amount of that "power" to other sites instead of distributing to your own pages.
The web is built on the effectiveness of hyperlinking, so this isn't an argument to never link out from your site, but having a number of not-very-useful external links on every page dissipating your own page power unnecessarily isn't a good strategy. (And no, no-following those links doesn't change the fact they send your page authority away instead of keeping it for the other links.)
Hope that helps clarify?
Paul
-
Hi there
External links in your footer won't hurt your PageRank but it will give a boost to the pages you're linking to (if they are follow). These links should also be relevant to your website, provide value to the user, and there should only be a couple of them as to not come across as a link farm.
That being said, I would be very weary of externally linking from your footer, though. The reason being is that this is on every single page of your website and potentially will take users off of your website. Even then, if they are important external links, most of the time users don't even make it to the footer, so they may never see them to begin with.
If they are important, use them with purpose and place them on and in pages where users will see them and find value. If they are not important, I wouldn't bother linking to them, let alone in the footer.
That's just my two cents, hope this helps!
P
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
-
Thousands of duplicate website links at "Who links the most" in Google webmasters. Any risk being duplicate website links pointing to website?
Hi all, As I mentioned some days back here, our duplicate website got indexed a month back. Unfortunately there are links to our original website. I noticed that thousands of links are from our duplicate website at "Links to Your Site". Will this hurts? Now we have blocked the duplicate website getting indexed. What to do to remove these links from "Who links the most"? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Link reclamation: What happens when backlinks are pointing to other page than the most related page? Any risks?
Hi all, We have started link reclamation process as we failed to redirect our old website links to newly created pages. Unfortunately most of the backlinks are pointing to a page which already has lots of backlinks. Just wondering if I can redirect the old pages to the other pages than the actual related page they must be pointing to make sure only one page doesn't take away all the backlinks. And what happens if Google find that backlink is pointing to a different page than the actual page? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Can we ignore "broken links" without redirecting to "new pages"?
Let's say we have reaplced www.website.com/page1 with www.website.com/page2. Do we need to redirect page1 to page2 even page1 doesn't have any back-links? If it's not a replacement, can we ignore a "lost page"? Many websites loose hundreds of pages periodically. What's Google's stand on this. If a website has replaced or lost hundreds of links without reclaiming old links by redirection, will that hurts?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Our company is mentioned on some high-traffic, authoritative sites and some of our products are linked as well. If we link to those pages, does it affect our SEO? How can we take advantage of those mentions?
I heard that if you link to another site, when Google indexes your site, they crawl that page that is referenced. By whatever metrics they use, if that site has your name or a link to your site, Google would rank it higher. I am not sure how true that is, but what value does another site mentioned our site have on our SEO?
Algorithm Updates | | JonathonOhayon1 -
Should I link to competitors?
Hi, I was wondering: we work in an extremely competitive market. There are 6 companies, offering the same service in my country: price comparison in a niche market. The competitors have hundreds of different websites, using iframe-techniques. Would it be helpful for me to link to those 6 competitors, in a piece of content about our company strategies, USP's and overview of the market? From a transparency point of view, i would prefer telling my visitors there are other competitors, which are undoubtedly performing very well, but we perform better on several aspects of the price comparison. On the other hand, my competitors benefit from the backlinks as well. Is my gain bigger than the gain of my competitors do you think? Has anyone tested this once?
Algorithm Updates | | Beekhuizen1 -
How important are links after Panda
I have noticed that the sites in my niche that were at the top of the SERP's are still at the top of the SERP's after panda. I have also heard people theorizing that links are no longer important, its now all about bounce rates, time on site, etc. Is there any consensus about how important links are after Panda? thx Paul
Algorithm Updates | | diogenes1 -
Any way to tell if a link has been devalued?
I have some listings in lawyer directories some of which have very hig PR , links, traffic, etc. For example, www.nolo.com, I know that Google has more or less recently devalued a lot of directory links. I would assume that a monster site like nolo would not be one of those, but does anyone know any way to tell? Paul
Algorithm Updates | | diogenes0 -
No-follow tags on links in the footer...do it or don't do it?
With some of the great reports SEOMoz has provided I've been able to start to take the correct steps towards fixing crawl issues, on-page issues, etc. One of my websites allows a customer to drill down to their specific state and then their city to apply for an auto loan. The SEOMoz reports told me I had too many links on these pages specifically. One of my ways to remedy this would be to add "no-follow" tags on the links in the footer as well as the links to the cities. Am I steering myself in the right/wrong direction? Should I be approaching this problem from a different perspective? Any help is greatly appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | fergseo0