Do we have too many links in our footer?
-
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.
-
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.
-
-
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?
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
-
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!
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
-
Google Webmaster Guideline Change: Human-Readable list of links
In the revised webmaster guidelines, google says "[...] Provide a sitemap file with links that point to the important pages on your site. Also provide a page with a human-readable list of links to these pages (sometimes called a site index or site map page)." (Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en) I guess what they mean by this is something like this: http://www.ziolko.de/sitemap.html Still, I wonder why they say that. Just to ensure that every page on a site is linked and consequently findable by humans (and crawlers - but isn't the XML sitemap for those and gives even better information)? Should not a good navigation already lead to every page? What is the benefit of a link-list-page, assuming you have an XML sitemap? For a big site, a link-list is bound to look somewhat cluttered and its usefulness is outclassed by a good navigation, which I assume as a given. Or isn't it? TL;DR: Can anybody tell me what exactly is the benefit of a human-readable list of all links? Regards, Nico
On-Page Optimization | | netzkern_AG0 -
Outbound links. External Links.
I have been reading alot on SEO and there is something confusing about having "Outbound links. External Links." on your main ranking page. Some say that We shouldn't have any out bound links. (from Random website) According to Yoast, we should have outbound links. (yoast.com) we should have outbound links but we should add the "no-follow" tag. (from Random website) Q: What should i do and follow?
On-Page Optimization | | kevinbp
If the answer is yes, how many outbound links is an appropriate amount per page?0 -
Internal linking question
I have a Q&A site which I am struggling to get ranking well in Google. I had a few questions 1. Should I be doing some internal linking and if so how is it best to do this? Should I go back into users questions and change certain keywords to links if applicable? 2. Should I be nofollowing the index pages ie /p1 /p2 of discussions? 3. If anyone has chance to look at the site and let me know if there is anything else I am doing wrong I would be really grateful. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | oliboy0 -
Is the use of some keywords necessary to be included in many of the pages?
Hello, I have a website about SEO and webdesign. I want to ask will mentioning these two keywords in many of my articles have any benefit for particular landing pages that I have. F.e.: I have two pages: example.com/seo example.com/web-design They are optimized and have Grade A in SEOMOZ's onpage tool for their two keywords. So my question is: Will broad use of my keywords SEO and webdesign in the text, title or alt not only on my two landing pages but also in other articles of my website also help these two pages to rank higher for their keyword. I see in Webmaster Tools (http://images.seroundtable.com/google-content-keywords-1351084751.jpg) there is an option to see the content keywords in your website. May be that shows that the content in my website is more relevant to particular topic and that also can influence the ranking of my two landing pages.
On-Page Optimization | | HrishikeshKarov0 -
The "100 links/page recommendation" - Do Duplicate Links Count?
We have way too many links on our homepage. The PageRank Link Juice Calculator (www.ecreativeim.com/pagerank-link-juice-calculator.php) counts them to 300. But all of them are not unique, that is some links point to the same URL. So my question: does the "100 links/page recommendation" refer to all anchors on the page or only to unique link target URLs? I know "100" is just a standard recommendation.
On-Page Optimization | | TalkInThePark0 -
No links or traffic to our articles
Hello, Our articles are written by a professional in the field, taylored to what we think our ecommerce customers would most want to know about. But there is no traffic to our articles and almost no inbound links. We have 15 articles around 500 words (roughly) each. We've got a right sidebar banner about our FAQ and articles and a rotating banner with one slde about our articles. Also, we have a tab at the top. We've had a good article section for 5 months, and a descent one for a couple of years Could it be our industry, or what can we do?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Developing my footer area
Hi, My website has no footer area and I would like some advise on creating/optimising it for seo. Would it advise to keyword link to 10 of my key pages & Have my full company address and this will help with localising my website Company name address, Dublin, Ireland
On-Page Optimization | | Socialdude0 -
Nofollow on these internal links?
On an x-cart ecommerce website we have, seomoz has picked up a lot of duplicate content, based on URLs that are different, but are essentially the same page. These come from Fitlers, that allow a page to show only certain colours and styles, reordering page by price etc, and also the page 2, page 3 etc of a category: All the below are '4ft-bedding.html' http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?filter=1&value=Pink http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?page=2 http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?sort=price&view_all=Y I've now changed all these internal links to rel="nofollow" on the a tag. Is that the correct and best way to sort? I might be mistaken on when I did this update and when the last report was ran, but on the SEOmoz crawling report, it still has the above as problem pages. thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | rowleysit-2598920