Do we have too many links in our footer?

[JohnTulley]

Hi guys, we have 41 links on our holiday(vacation) rental website, this seems too many when looking at best practice. 24 of these are links to community pages while 8 link to activities pages. The community and activity pages are also accessible from links on the top menu so they are not strictly necessary but do get 10% of site clickthroughs according to Google in-page analytics. I therefore do not want to remove the links if there is no good evidence that google will penalize us for this. What do you think would be best for our site? Thanks, John Tulley.

footer.jpg

[eyepaq]

Hi,

Yes the footer links are sitewide.

** Then I am sure those are not all 100% relevant for every page and you are spliting the Page Rank juice / equity / votes to all of the pages linked for all pages.

I would suggest to keep in the footer:

• links that user can actually click on and links to releveant pages vs the pages they are placed on

• links that are not in the page (menu, body, side bars etc)

Yes all the links (apart from the corporate links are duplicated in the menubar under the page header.

** They it will make sense to keep there only the ones that are really important not all of them. And again, like stated above, you are spliting the votes to all links per page no matter what if the links are duplicated or not. More then that the anchor text of the footer links won't matter anyway as only the first one is taken in consideration and since the other are above those will be considered.

[tomcraig86]

I'd be wary of that community page, however it's extremely unlikely that one page will have a negative impact across the whole website, so it's not a high priority

As mentioned below, reducing the footer on internal pages might be an option?

[JohnTulley]

Hi eyepaq,

Thanks for the reply,

Yes the footer links are sitewide.

Yes all the links (apart from the corporate links are duplicated in the menubar under the page header.

Do you then recommend just having the corporate links in the footer?

[JohnTulley]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the reply, most of our property pages have between 110 and 140 links per page. Our community pages may be a problem as they list each property on a community and for each property there is 5 image links and 2 text links. One community page lists 28 properties and that page has a total of 305 links.

[eyepaq]

Hi,

For sure you won't get a penalty for having too many links in the footer. More then that you don't have that many anyway.

Is this footer site wide ? ( on all pages of the site ). A good idea is to have a more heavy footer on the home page only and have a more dedicated version on the inner pages.

Are those link also available in the body of the page / pages since you do have some clicks on those but GA shows the links CTR overall not per individual links so that means maybe the users are not actually clicking on the links in the fotter if those are also available in the header, body side bars etc.

If yes, that will "harm" you in the way that you split all internal link equity to all links per page including those in the footer - so as far as structure is not really a good idea as I am sure some pages that are linked from your pages - all around - including the footer are more important then others but you are actually diluting those "votes" by having that many links per page all around.

Again, the bottom line is that there is no way you will get a penalty but:

• google might not follow all links if you don't have enough authority

• some of your important pages won't get the needed "attention" due to the fact that you are linking to that many pages from all pages of your site.

[tomcraig86]

John,

41 links for a footer area, whilst it is a large number, isn't too many really. You should be careful on the total number of links on the page however. I believe you should try to cap it at 100, but I think I've read somewhere 200+ is classed excessive

Hope this helps!