Is my footer bad? i.e. hurting rankings
-
Just curious what people think of my footer. I think it provides some value.
Not that many people click on it but it doesn't look that bad in my opinion.
Curious what others think. If getting rid of it would help SEO I'd look into it. I outsource all my coding though so don't want to spend money tweaking what doesn't need to be done.
Thanks for the help!
-
I really liked what Daniel said about using Crazy Egg to analyze user behavior, but you can also do something similar using Google Analytics.
Unfortunately, my suspicion is that very few of your users are clicking on those links. Google knows that footer links are rarely clicked, and scores of SEOs have abused this area in the past, and that's why Google tends to devalue any links placed there.
So even though in this case, the links there may provide some user benefit, Google most likely doesn't pass much link value through them, and may even devalue the anchor text text used, as these are site-wide footer links.
On the other hand, even those those links aren't helping you from an SEO perspective, they probably aren't hurting you very much either. You've chosen broad, partial-match anchor text, and the number of links seem within reason.
Food for thought: If the links are important to visitors, is the footer the best place for them? Perhaps if you found a more prominent location higher up in the navigation, you might see improved click-through rates, and you might even gain an SEO benefit from it.
Just something to think about.
-
Thanks, and yes people don't always make it that far down. I'm definitely going to add the terms of service and privacy policy on the bottom. Good points. Thanks again
-
Thanks Andrew, good stuff. Glad to know it's not of the spammy variety. The last update almost made it sound like any footer was a bad footer. Working on internal links now.
-
I think you may be thinking of the updates that says links in footers are bad now? Correct me if I'm wrong. I believe the intent of that is that site wide links in footers of other peoples sites that link to yours are devalued. This means that you won't be getting link juice from every page on their website like you would expect.
Links in your own footer should be for the benefit of your visitors first, and I think that's what you've done with your links. If you're trying to mold your PageRank in a specific way, try breadcrumbs or internal linking from the content of the page.
-
I don't see a problem with your Footer - I like it.
I do have, on the other hand a theory, as of why people might not be clicking on it (They don't scroll down enough). But a theory is a theory, so have you tried any Heat Map tool to analyze this - CrazyEgg for example?
On another note... you might consider (This is something I am doing with my own site, or at least I will this week ) to add some no-follow attributes to those links... which ones? The ones that you would in fact consider adding them to (if you think twice about it maybe you should add the attribute to it).
Also you might want to think about having a 'Privacy Policy' and/or 'Term of Use' links there... Those are good signals that you are a legitimate website... not to mention Ad Center will not let you (or at least that's what their policies state) advertise with them if these are not present and/or accessible from your Home Page.
Just my thoughts....
Daniel
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
-
Completely inaccurate rank tracking data
So Moz, Rank Ranger and data from Search Console all show this domain to be position #1 on Google for a certain search term. However, we can't see the same in manual search (desktop, mobile, incognito, &pws=0, different IPs, phone a friend and so on) and Analytics is showing no organic traffic. We can't even find the website in the top 10 pages. ANY IDEAS? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Harry_TheClickHub0 -
Too many iframes hurts ranking?
I have 6 different iframe blocks (with same content in those iframes) in every page of my website. I know iframe don't be crawled by search engines but, maybe you experts give me some advice? Is that negative for SEO ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nopsts0 -
Will changing Google Places address hurt rankings?
I have a client transferring ownership of their service business (photo booth rental). The current listed address will change, so my main concern is preserving the rankings during the transition. Should I change the Google Local listing to a new physical address, or change it to "serve a surrounding area"? It seems best to set as "serving a surrounding area", but I know Google is really weird about making local listing changes. I've seen and heard about countless listings falling completely off the map after being updated. Any advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Compare the rankings
Hi All, I have an example 2 domains are targeting the same keyword, one of them ranks higher then another. Here is the image from OSE http://www.freeimagehosting.net/udq2f Would you be able to tell ( based on the image )which of the domains is winning , "domain 1" or "domain2" and what exactly the " looser " should do to improve its rankings Rgds Webdeal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal0 -
How to be a good SEO optimizer while competing with a good ranked Bad SEO optimizer?
My keywords are very competitive. My on page optimization report gives A grade for all the keywords I want to target to my Root domain. But my root domain does not show up on search engines for those same keywords. So thanks to SEOmoz i have managed to understand the place I lack is good link building. My competitors have done lot of link building through spamming, commenting on blogs, directories etc. Now according to good seo, this is not right. What do i do? I get digging more in it, i realized that i am getting traffic mostly for less globally searched keywords. But my competitors get high traffic from well searched keywords. How do i cope with such competition? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiddleEastSeo0 -
Ranking with other pages not index
The site ranks on page 4-5 with other page like privacy, about us, term pages. I encounter this problem allot in the last weeks; this usually occurs after the page sits 1-2 months on page 1 for the terms. I'm thinking of to much use the same anchor as a primary issue. The sites in questions are 1-5 pages microniche sites. Any suggestions is appreciated. Thank You
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | m3fan0 -
How to rank high on Bing?
Today, I was checking Google Analytics for my website. I found too many variation in Visits between Google & Bing. I can understand that, We are not getting specific visits from Bing due to bad ranking. Then, I have done detail R & D + read few useful articles to get it done. I found such a important discussion on Bing forum which is associated to draft on page. I also checked Bing webmaster tools to know more about my website. I found that, crawling from Bing is really slow and let duane know about it via Twitter. I have read Bing rankings cheat sheet. But, I am really confuse after reading it. Because, I am following Google webmaster guidelines as well as Bing webmaster tools guidelines. So, How can I improve my performance over Bing? Is there any rock solid method for Bing like Google which may help me to achieve milestone? I have one request for Rand to write down marathon blog post to rank high on Bing....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Quick ranking boost
Hi, What is hte quickest way to get up the rankings for a particular not hugley competitive keyword ? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prongo0