Footer Navigation
-
We have links to our key pages at the top of the website:-
- Home
- Our Services
- Work Examples
- About Us
But we have many more pages than this. In the footer of the website we have additional links to the individual services and pages such as FAQs and Customer Feedback.
Does having the links here lessen their effectiveness in terms of SEO?
-
Do you mean to say that link juice is lost from one page to another page. I thought that when one page links to another page, the pagerank of the original page is preserved, while it flows to second page..
-
Links are treated differently based on their position on a page: in content, navigation, sidebar, footer, etc.
I would recommend offering links which are helpful to your site's visitors. Don't attempt to link every page on your site from the home page unless you have a small site. Link to the most helpful, interesting and useful pages of your site.
To answer your question directly, yes, having the links in the footer does lessen their SEO impact, but that is not a bad thing. Your FAQ and Customer Feedback pages are normally not key pages for your site. Keep in mind your site has a specific amount of link juice to offer. In order for one page to gain, other pages have to lose.
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
-
Impact of keyword/keyphrases density on header/footer
Hi, It might be a stupid question but I prefer to clear things out if it's not a problem: Today I've seen a website where visitors are prompted no less than 5 times per page to "call [their] consultants".
On-Page Optimization | | GhillC
This appears twice on the header, once on the side bar (mouse over pop up), once in the body of most of the pages and once in the footer. So obviously, besides the body of the pages, it appears at least 4 times on every single pages as it's part of the website template. In the past, I never really wondered re the menu, the footer etc as it's usually not hammering the same stuff repeatedly everywhere. Anyway, I then had a look at their blog and, given the average length of their articles, the keyword density around these prompts is about 0.5% to 0.8% for each page. This is huge! So basically my question is as follow: is Google's algorithm smart enough to understand what this is and make abstraction of this "content" to focus on the body of the pages (probably simply focusing on the tags)? Or does it send wrong signals and confuse search engine more than anything else? Reading stuff such as this, I wonder how does it work when this is not navigational or links elements. Thanks,
G Note: I’m purposely not speaking about the UX which is obviously impacted by such a hammering process.0 -
City and state link stuffing in footer
A competitor has links to every state in the U.S., every county in our state and nearby states, and every city in those nearby states. All with corresponding link text and titles that lead to pages with thin, duplicate content. They consistently rank high in the SERPS and have for years. What gives--I mean, isn't this something that should get you penalized?
On-Page Optimization | | nkolson0 -
WBF told me to get rid of my low contrast footer links...
I just finished watching WBF where Rand took a moment to identify some of the potentially harmful SEO practices that could be penalized in the upcoming algo update targeting over-optimization. (Great post BTW!) One of which was using low contrast, exact match footer links to inner pages. But I couldn't help but notice something similar being done on the SEOmoz site. In the attached image, I compare this to a site I've done using a similar practice. What are your thoughts on footer links found in this example and how should we, as SEOs, handle footer links in the future? footer-links.gif
On-Page Optimization | | AlexanderAvery0 -
Status of Ajax and SEO? Changing navigation from plain HTML to AJAX.
We will change an old school HTML drop down navigation for an AJAX drop down one. What's your experience in regards to Google indexing AJAX? I know that Google is now able to read more stuff than in the past, but I need some stories "from the trenches" if you're willing to share. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | gerardoH0 -
Keep our category navigation in tree structure but move our URLs to a more flat structure. Good plan?
In our Magento store, products are arranged into categories, subcategories and so on. We typically have 3 or 4 layers of category depth. This makes it nice and easy for customers to find stuff, but it means that the end categories have massive long urls. I'd like to keep our category tree structure in place from a navigation point of view, but I feel the url structure is pushing some important stuff to the back of the shop as it were. We have something like 200 categories in total. So, assuming every individual category has an a unique name, I'd like to rewrite the urls so that: ourshop.com/car-parts/
On-Page Optimization | | DWJames
stays as
ourshop.com/car-parts/ ourshop.com/car-parts/suspension/
becomes
ourshop.com/suspension/ ourshop.com/car-parts/suspension/springs
becomes
ourshop.com/springs/ ourshop.com/car-parts/suspension/springs/thismake-lowering-springs
becomes
ourshop.com/thismake-lowering-springs/ and so on....
I'll need some custom magento URL rewrite work done, but that's another story. The real question is whether you guys feel this is worthwhile? Are there any other stores with a deep categorised navigation structure, but a flat url structure? thanks, James0 -
Navigation Links in Footer
What are your thoughts about navigation links in the footer? For example: www.chasepaymentech.com - good, bad, or indifferent for SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | kasi0 -
Should I show and allow following of deep navigation links?
Hello mozzers, I am currently designing an e-commerce system for various companies, my pilot being www.containerpadlocks.co.uk. I you look on the left in the navigation, you will see only the top level categories are visible (and in the html). Sub categories are only shown if viewing a parent category, or a product in that category/subcategory. My question would be, should I be listing all my subcategories in that navigation (hidden from the user) to allow Google to index my pages easily, and will this promote more PageRank and internal links for my site, or will this just dilute my page juice? Many Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | jcarter
James0 -
Filtered Navigation, Duplicate content issue on an Ecommerce Website
I have navigation that allows for multiple levels of filtering. What is the best way to prevent the search engine from seeing this duplicate content? Is it a big deal nowadays? I've read many articles and I'm not entirely clear on the solution. For example. You have a page that lists 12 products out of 100: companyname.com/productcategory/page1.htm And then you filter these products: companyname.com/productcategory/filters/page1.htm The filtered page may or may not contain items from the original page, but does contain items that are in the unfiltered navigation pages. How do you help the search engine determine where it should crawl and index the page that contains these products? I can't use rel=canonical, because the exact set of products on the filtered page may not be on any other unfiltered pages. What about robots.txt to block all the filtered pages? Will that also stop pagerank from flowing? What about the meta noindex tag on the filitered pages? I have also considered removing filters entirely, but I'm not sure if sacrificing usability is worth it in order to remove duplicate content. I've read a bunch of blogs and articles, seen the whiteboard special on faceted navigation, but I'm still not clear on how to deal with this issue.
On-Page Optimization | | 13375auc30