Should I remove footer links?
-
I added footer links to my site some months ago as I figured that any authority my home page had would be distributed to several of my other most important pages on my site helping them to rank. Would I be better to remove them and would that improve the authority of my home page as less 'link juice' is being distributed.
I did originally set up a page per keyword on my site and start building links to each one but as my home page has a good authority I am going to target several keywords on my home page instead as I have some way to go to improve the authority of my other important pages and think this would be a better solution.
It would reduce the number of links I have per page however I did see Matt Cutts say that the no more than 100 links per page rule doesn't apply any more. Do footer links add any SEo value?
-
If those pages listed in the footer are really important then I would feature them on the homepage with a nice juicy image and enthusiastic description.
Nobody looks at links in the footer. If these pages merit attention then give it to them properly.
-
Hi Samuel,
Typically the footer is one of the most accessible components of a website, but search crawlers typically crawl this section last.
Whether or not you should have a site footer really depends on your sites navigation and how accessible your most important pages are. If it is SEO friendly, then simply put links to the HTML sitemap page and the most recent blog post/news links. However if it isn't then you should add footer links to your most important pages.
You can still use Matt Cutt's guideline as a general rule of thumb, You could also use Danny Dover's analogy of the anthill in his book.
Samuel finally each page is considered as a home page in search engines, with each having equal opportunity for ranking. You shouldn't only focus only on the home page is considered more generic than other page. You could potenitally impact the number of people clicking through to your site. Hence each page should be priortised, but have equal focus.'
Regards,
- V
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
-
Disavow Links & Paid Link Removal (discussion)
Hey everyone, We've been talking about this issue a bit over the last week in our office, I wanted to extend the idea out to the Moz community and see if anyone has some additional perspective on the issue. Let me break-down the scenario: We're in the process of cleaning-up the link profile for a new client, which contains many low quality SEO-directory links placed by a previous vendor. Recently, we made a connection to a webmaster who controls a huge directory network. This person found 100+ links to our client's site on their network and wants $5/link to have them removed. Client was not hit with a manual penalty, this clean-up could be considered proactive, but an algorithmic 'penalty' is suspected based on historical keyword rankings. **The Issue: **We can pay this ninja $800+ to have him/her remove the links from his directory network, and hope it does the trick. When talking about scaling this tactic, we run into some ridiculously high numbers when you talk about providing this service to multiple clients. **The Silver Lining: **Disavow Links file. I'm curious what the effectiveness of creating this around the 100+ directory links could be, especially since the client hasn't been slapped with a manual penalty. The Debate: Is putting a disavow file together a better alternative to paying for crappy links to be removed? Are we actually solving the bad link problem by disavowing or just patching it? Would choosing not to pay ridiculous fees and submitting a disavow file for these links be considered a "good faith effort" in Google's eyes (especially considering there has been no manual penalty assessed)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Etna0 -
First attempt at manual penalty removal fails - all example links provided by Google not in Majestic, GWT, Ahrefs, LinkDetox, or OSE.
Hello all, I am trying to recover a site from a manual penalty. I already submitted once. Here's what we did. We took the link profile from webmaster tools, majestic seo, ahrefs, link detox, and ose. We manually looked at every link to exclude good links. Then used a tool to run the removal campaign. Submitted a disavow file and reconsideration request. Google came back with a denial. When I looked at the three example links that Google provided, they were definitely spammy (forum profile and comment spam). But none of them were in any of the original csv downloads from GWT, Ahrefs, Majestic, OSE, or LinkDetox. What can I do? Thanks in advance for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NicoleDeLeon0 -
How related to your industry do your links need to be?
Hello, Some of the hottest link building techniques right now are guest posting, viral content, and link bating. But I often see SEOs produce content that has very little relevance to the actually industry they are in. For instance, a dentist might build links by guest posting on a tech site, an attorney might create an infographic on color psychology, and an accountant might venture into celebrity gossip. While more advanced SEOs try to make sure that the content they produce has some relevance to their industry (even if it's marginal), where is the line drawn?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lezal0 -
How to remove duplicate content, which is still indexed, but not linked to anymore?
Dear community A bug in the tool, which we use to create search-engine-friendly URLs (sh404sef) changed our whole URL-structure overnight, and we only noticed after Google already indexed the page. Now, we have a massive duplicate content issue, causing a harsh drop in rankings. Webmaster Tools shows over 1,000 duplicate title tags, so I don't think, Google understands what is going on. <code>Right URL: abc.com/price/sharp-ah-l13-12000-btu.html Wrong URL: abc.com/item/sharp-l-series-ahl13-12000-btu.html (created by mistake)</code> After that, we ... Changed back all URLs to the "Right URLs" Set up a 301-redirect for all "Wrong URLs" a few days later Now, still a massive amount of pages is in the index twice. As we do not link internally to the "Wrong URLs" anymore, I am not sure, if Google will re-crawl them very soon. What can we do to solve this issue and tell Google, that all the "Wrong URLs" now redirect to the "Right URLs"? Best, David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmvw0 -
Article Marketing For Link Building
Just wanted to get a discussion going about the effectiveness of article marketing for building links. All of my content will be decent and unique. I will submit to the following 10 directories: Ezine Buzzle Goarticles Article Dashboard Sooperarticles Helium Articlebase Articlealley Isnare Article City Of course, varied anchor text and relevant content to my various niches. I just want to know if this is still an effective link building strategy. Please don't recommend i "try" something else because i am doing everything else as well. Thanks guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielblinman0 -
How Can Low Quality Links Be Removed?
Let's say that in looking in OSE that you find an overall low quality link profile. Let's say that some of those links were acquired by using article marketing systems like UAW or SEO Link Vine, which were hard hit in Penguin. Let's also say that some keywords were targeted within blog networks that passed a lot of page rank to targeted pages. Let's say that at one point in time an offshore link building team was used and they posted low quality blog comments on pages with hundreds of outbound links. Let's say as a result of the drop in SERPS that you've finally been convinced that there must be a better way and in the process join SEO Moz - and now you want to clean up the low quality link profile. How does one go about removing links on such a diverse number of sites? Are there best practices for how to remove links you longer want pointed to your site? Or is it simply best to go on about the work of building a lot of quality links and let the past be in the past? Thanks for your input Mozzers...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sdennison0 -
If google ignores links from "spammy" link directories ...
Then why does SEO moz have this list: http://www.seomoz.org/dp/seo-directory ?? Included in that list are some pretty spammy looking sites such as: <colgroup><col width="345"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg
| http://www.site-sift.com/ |
| http://www.2yi.net/ |
| http://www.sevenseek.com/ |
| http://greenstalk.com/ |
| http://anthonyparsons.com/ |
| http://www.rakcha.com/ |
| http://www.goguides.org/ |
| http://gosearchbusiness.com/ |
| http://funender.com/free_link_directory/ |
| http://www.joeant.com/ |
| http://www.browse8.com/ |
| http://linkopedia.com/ |
| http://kwika.org/ |
| http://tygo.com/ |
| http://netzoning.com/ |
| http://goongee.com/ |
| http://bigall.com/ |
| http://www.incrawler.com/ |
| http://rubberstamped.org/ |
| http://lookforth.com/ |
| http://worldsiteindex.com/ |
| http://linksgiving.com/ |
| http://azoos.com/ |
| http://www.uncoverthenet.com/ |
| http://ewilla.com/ |0 -
Switching to masked affiliate links
Hi there, I run a content affiliate website where I introduce products in articles and then link to merchants where the user can buy the respective product. Currently I am using regular affiliate links here with the "nofollow" attribute. With growing size of the site, I would like to switch to masked affiliate links, so instead of a link like "jdoqocy.com/click-123" I want to use "mydomain.com/recommend/123". My question here is: When switching to masked affiliate links, does it makes sense to also convert all the older unmasked affiliate links? If yes, what would be the best way to do that - Convert all old links at once or convert them over time (e.g. over a few month)? Currently about 2/3 of my site's outbound links are unmasked, external affiliate links. So I am afraid that changing this relatively large share of links from unmasked external affiliate links to masked links doenst look natural at all... Thank you for your advice!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FabRag0