It has been recommended that we remove the number of links in our footer, should we?
-
We have a pretty user friendly footer with almost an entire site-map on it. It's similar to many e-commerce company footers, and I think it's useful to the user.
SEO professionals have recommended that to reduce the number of links on any given page on our site we should compress our footer and only show the headers, thus removing many links.
This in my opinion is a disservice to the user and makes the site not look as good, but maybe it's a good idea for SEO to get rid of so many links per page?
What do you think?
(pic attached)
-
This was just mentioned in Rand's white board video, tip #3. The only thing is it conflicts with SEOmoz's linking, as they have about 20 links on the footer. Are they there because they are getting clicked on?
I'm pretty sure nobody clicks on my footer links and am in the process of removing them and adding customized side navigations on specific pages to add a better navigational structure.
To SEOmoz, why so many footer links on SEOmoz if it's a 2012 no, no?
Note: Must be logged out to see footer links.
-
@Aran: Did you find out if people actually clicked on those footer links? From the screenshot, the links don't look too bad and it's possible to keep an overview. So it would be interesting to know if people don't even click on a well-done footer...
-
I definitely agree that you should figure out if your footer links are adding value to your users. If they are, I'm not sure I'd blindly follow the "prune your links" philosophy. I note that Zappos.com seems to rank OK with a pretty link heavy footer. One size does not fit all.
-
There are a number of different ways in GA, Omniture, etc to track specific link clicks from places like the footer...many of which I'm not extremely well versed in, but the googles certainly know. I would definitely recommend doing that to get a pure numbers look at the situation.
I'd also though recommend you modify Will Critchlow's mturk method of grading content for a look at usability of the footer and/or use something like usertesting.com to get some qualitative feedback on the footer. Guaranteed you will get a look at your design that you've never even thought of, and the cost is so extremely low when you consider what you can get out of it.
-
Thanks Egol! I have looked at CrazyEgg in the past, and I will revisit them now.
-
Thanks Ryan - My challenge is getting actionable data on how useful the footer links are to users. How would you recommend using Google Analytics to accomplish this?
-
You are probably right, but by removing the subcategories for the other sections of the site (Guides, Blog) maybe lateral movement throughout the site will be reduced... is that reduced browsing worth the SEO benefit by the number of links removed?
-
Thanks Albin!
How would you get the most useful data on the footer links with Google Analytics? I use site overlay and it's not very accurate because site overlay just reports on the percent of people who click on a link on the page, regardless of location. I am not 100% certain as to how to get actionable data on the effectiveness of the footer.
It's a pretty labour intensive project redesigning and re-implementing a new footer so I want to make sure it's really worth it.
-
You are operating under the assumption that people are using those footer links.
Run a program like CrazyEgg to see if anyone is clicking those links.
I bet nobody clicks them.
-
Ryan, your absolutely right about the .xml-sitemap. The important is of course that the sitemap is reported to the search engines and therefore it's not mandatory to place it in the footer. (Should have thought of that...sorry)
-
I strongly agree with Albin and Joe. Check to see what your user's think. I'll take the user experience over a group of SEO experts. What do SEO's know?
Your footer links are very well presented and represent your site well. It is a best practice to minimize your links. If you discovered your links are not actually being used then the feedback from your users is basically those unused links are not helpful and you can consider removing them OR possibly altering the anchor text to something that users may find more helpful.
I will disagree with Albin about the sitemaps. I usually recommend an HTML sitemap but I would not recommend placing a link to a XML sitemap on your page. Offering two sitemaps to users does not make sense to me, and a HTML sitemap is clearly the more useful way to present a sitemap. In your case, I probably wouldn't offer a HTML sitemap either. You mentioned that you already offer links to almost all of the pages on your site. If the couple pages you do not offer links to are not very popular and you have other links to those pages, you may be better of as-is.
I have the impression many SEOs blindly follow certain "rules" such as eliminate footer links and always go xyz. It's important to view standards as guidelines which need to be flexible and adjusted for each site's needs.
-
Pruning links from page templates (header, footer, etc.) is generally a good idea if they don't go to important pages. As Albin suggests, listen to the data. What are users not clicking on?
I can see some of these as not being needed in the footer. If your store pages are used as navigation, these are redundant, unless users like using them in the footer. Pages like "returns" and "order tracking" probably aren't making you a lot of money, and can still be easily found from a customer service page that is linked to from the footer. This way users can still find what they need, but you only devote one link instead of four or five.
I don't think removing a handful of links from the footer will diminish the look of the site or the user experience significantly.
-
What does the statistics says about clicks on the links in the footer? Does users actually find the footer useful?
If there are some links in the footers that might be popular to the users, then keep them and erase the others. If you have 100+ links on your page, that's really bad. Keep the amount of links to a minimum and try to "listen" to the users by only having useful links in the footer. If you're using e.g. Analytics, it might be easy to check these stats.
Report these stats for me and I'll give you a quick analysis about which links to keep and which to get rid of.
Another follow-up question; Does your page has a link to a xml-sitemap AND a html-sitemap? If not, get it for best optimization
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
-
Number of internal links and passing 'link juice' down to key pages.
Howdy Moz friends. I've just been checking out this post on Moz from 2011 and wanted to know how relevant it is today? I'm particularly interested in a number of links we have on our HP potentially harming important landing page rankings because not enough 'link juice is getting to them i.e) are they are being diluted by all the many other links on the page? (deeper pages, faqs, etc etc) It seems strange to me that as Google as has got more sophisticated this would still be that relevant (thus the reason for posting). Anyway, I thought I was definitely worth asking. If we can leverage more out of our on-page efforts then great 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
Duplicate links from forum what to do?
After a crawl it found over 5k errors and over 5k warnings. Those are: Duplicate page content; Duplicate page title; Overly-Dynamic URLs; Missing Meta descr; Title Element too long. All those come from domain.com/forum/ I don't need SEO on forum so what should I do? What could be an easy solution to this? No index? No follow? Please help
On-Page Optimization | | OVJ0 -
How can I nofollow my affiliate links?
I have a lot of affiliate links and I need to find an efficient way to nofollow them. I have over 500 blog posts and most have an affiliate link. I use Wordpress and Genesis. Any advice?
On-Page Optimization | | 2bloggers0 -
Is there Page Link Counter software?
Hi, I receive more than 100 links error and when i count the links, it is not even 100. I'd like to know how 100 links are counted. I was wondering if anyone can suggest me a tool and method that can help me to count links. Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | Rubix0 -
Too many on page links in sitemap.html
My crawl report is flagging an issue with too many links to one of my pages, this page is my sitemap.html. However, I have coded the page so that if required is specified it generates an .xml version of the page and if not then the html version is displayed. What is the best way to stop the crawl finding the html version whilst maintaining it on the site for clients navigation?
On-Page Optimization | | SamPenno0 -
Number of Words Product Pages
Hello, Can you give me some examples of how many words you use for product pages? I know it's going to vary and that quality is more important than number of words, but what's been optimal for you and why?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
SEO strategy recommendations?
Hi My website http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk is now ranking on the 1st page of Bing and Google for phrases such as Chartered Accountant Swansea and Tax Planners Swansea But the phrase 'accountants swansea' is still performing poorly - as it is near the bottom of the second page? Would I be better placing more accountant swansea phrases on the homepage of the site or would this have an adverse effect on the current 'Chartered Accountants Swansea' ranking as would this be classed as keyword cannabilisation? So would it be better to further optimise http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk/accounting.htm and include the phrases Accountants Swansea and Auditors Swansea or would this act against the homepage? Sorry for the questions I am just looking for the best route forward to further boost the ranking on additional terms as the majority of the 1st page listings seem to weak?
On-Page Optimization | | idv0 -
If I have too many on-page links can I reduce it with nofollow tags or do the links have to be removed?
On my site I have a top nav drop down menu but once visitors go to one particularly large subsection, that menu is repeated on the left for easier viewing. As a result, I shoot over 100 links on page. Can I put nofollow or noindex tags on the left side links and reduce my "official" on-page links count or do I have to actually eliminate some of the links? Thanks, Oak
On-Page Optimization | | CSA-2316710