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.
Static Links in Sidebar Hurting SEO?
-
Our website currently has a sidebar/widget area that appears on almost all pages throughout of entire site (350 page domain). In that sidebar, we have some static links and some non-static links. Right now there are:
6 Related Post Links - Non-Static
1 - Call To Action - Static to a landing page
10 Calculators - Static - These calculators I think are very useful to our users (financial website).So in total 17 total sidebar links, 11 static links, and 6 which change based on the content of the page. Do you think these static links from an SEO perspective can be hurting us? Is there some sort of best practice for sidebar links in regards to quantity as well as static vs non-static?
Thanks!
-
Tons of great advice here. My responsive design drops the sidebar to below 5% of the average scroll depth so I binned it and nothing bad happened to pages per session or time on site or bouncerate or any of the important user signals. I do have a site-wide 'BOOK AN EMERGENCY APPOINTMENT' button but people use it and we're killing it for emergencies. It's one of our best catagories and is hotly competitive. It's in red and replaced a trustpilot widget that was taking people off site.
One of the best decisions I ever made and I was tearing my hair out about site wide links messing with SEO but it didn't happen for us. All the google results were 'no it's SPAMMY' - but they are just a load of content creators jumping on a bandwagon, here in the Moz community, as you can see, things are more nuanced.
So if it's relevant and helpful keep it. Do you have Hotjar. Allows you to see what peope are clicking on.
SWL and footer links Is one of those where spammy sites use it so people say - "ooh don't ever use it" - but you must not be that binary. If it helps the users then keep it. In my case hardly anyone used them so I dropped them in favour of one important button.
But an additional bump in pageviews and time on site because people are navigating around your site is absolute gold. So you must encourage that. but remember Cialdini's jam experiment. More than three choices is going to induce decisional paralysis especially when you have only a second and the user is almost making unconscious decisions navigating. It's like driving. You're not thinking what you're doing - it's automatic. So make is fluid and easy and watch the user feedback signals.
How about "Learn more", "buy something" or 'back to navigation'
-
That's the way a lot of people have their responsiveness configured. There are many who drop the sidebar. Others move elements of the sidebar into the content to make the options visible higher in the page.
-
Yeah I was talking about desktop when talking about the sidebar, but in mobile it does move just below the main content and is still visible.
-
When I hear the word "sidebar" these days, I think of a desktop site. I don't think of "sidebars" on a mobile site.
If you are talking "desktop" and you have a mobile version of your site, does that sidebar appear in any format on the mobile site? If not, your sidebar will not be an SEO consideration once Google and your site move to the mobile index. At that time you will lose any SEO benefit (or curse) that the sidebar added to the desktop version of your website.
This is the issue about the mobile first index that very few people are talking about and a lot of people havn't even thought about.
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 can I stop a tracking link from being indexed while still passing link equity?
I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this: http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/ The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com. Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding Disallow: /clkn/ in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page. How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?
Technical SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
How to set up internal linking with subcategories?
I'm building a new website and am setting up internal link structure with subcategories and hoping to do so with best Seo practices in mind. When linking to a subcategory's main page, would I make the internal link www.xxx.com/fishing/ or www.xxx.com/fishing/index.html or does it matter? I'm just trying to avoid duplicate content I guess, if Google saw each page as a separate page. Any other cautions when using subdirectories in my navigation?
Technical SEO | | wplodge0 -
Seo For Forum Sites
I have forum site.I've opened it 2 months ago.But there is a problem.Therefore my content is unique , my site's keyword ranking constantly changing..Sometimes my site's ranking drops from first 500.After came to 70s. I didn't make any off page seo to my site.What is the problem ?
Technical SEO | | tutarmi0 -
How to fix broken links?
Hi, I use WordPress CMS with Yoast SEO plugin. I have just found out that my 403 errors increased dramatically. It seems that all my tags below of each post are being broken for some reason. When i click on the tags i get the following massage: **403 Forbidden Request forbidden by administrative rules. ** I assume it has something to do with the configuration within Yoast SEO plugin. Dose anyone know how should i fix that? Thanks, Raviv evsGujA
Technical SEO | | Indiatravelz0 -
Self-referencing links
I personally think that self-referencing links are silly. It's blatantly easy for Google to tell and my instinct says that the link juice for this would simply evaporate rather than passing back to itself. Does anyone have information backing me up from an authoritative source? I can't find any info about this linked to Matt Cutts, Rand or any of those I look up to.
Technical SEO | | IPROdigital0 -
Does Bitly hurt your SEO?
I often use bit.ly or Google URL shortener in links when other websites post my articles so I can track clicks. However, I am thinking this may HURT my SEO given that it is taking away a back link to my website. Is that logic correct ? If so, what is a good way to be able to track clicks if a website posts your article without jeopardizing the SEO value?
Technical SEO | | StreetwiseReports1 -
Forum Profile Links
Are they really important? Many preach they are, and there are tonnes of services out there who give you thousands of forum profile links in no time. I strictly believe in genuine links built the hard way, and definitely don't want to get into anything which is black hat. Please suggest if building several Forum Profile Links is an appropriate way of building links?
Technical SEO | | KS__2 -
Iframes & SEO
I've got a client that wants a site with all content in iFrames. They saw another site they liked & asked if we could do it. Of course we can technically. How big a negative hit would they take with SEO? Is there anything we can do to mitigate it, such as redirects, etc? Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | wcksmith0