Affect in SERPs when moving footer links off the homepage
-
I have several pages that rank highly in the SERPs and these pages are linked directly to my homepage in the footer. I want to clean up my footer because I have too many site wide links but don't want to hurt the SERP rankings during the transition. Will removing these page links from the footer impact SERP rankings?
-
Thank you Moosa and Doug - your answers were very thoughtful and helpful!
Do you believe that reducing the # of footer links will have a positive impact by providing additional link juice to the important pages that I keep?
-
What links do you need in your footer?
The importance of these pages isn't just their ranking position, but also the traffic that they are getting, and the conversion rate (how qualified are the visitors?)
I would audit your content and find out what pages really matter to you and then, if you really need to, remove the links to the pages that aren't of any commercial value and question if you actually need those pages at all.
Can you consolidate content onto one page (for example combining any lega/privacy policy/terms of service content onto one page)
Are any of the pages in your footer also linked in your main navigation? If so then you can probably remove them from the footer without affecting too much. I would add a word of caution through - if you've got lengthy content and visitors (the real human beings) are using the footer to find their way about then it's going to affect usability.
Removing links from a page passing lots of link equity then you are going to weaken the target page - if you've got loads of links on your home page and you prune some of the zero value pages you may find that you're passing more equity to your important pages.
As Moosa suggests, if you want to do some housekeeping, reduce the risk by making small changes and testing.
-
If the links in the footer of the website are of the same websites (internal pages) then removing them from the footer (as per my personal experience) will cause ranking fluctuation ...I am not sure why you are removing it but if it is because you want to stay away from the penalty caused by site wide links then IMPO with internal pages this won’t be a problem...
If you really want to remove the link from the footer the best idea is to remove the links one by one and see the impact of it on SERP rankings overall...
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
-
Do the external links at footer menu take away PR or Linkjuice?
Hi all, We have some external links on our footer menu. I'm just trying to figure out whether these take away pagerank. What if they are follow or nofollow? How fair to have DMCA badge with link at footer? Will this hurts? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Sub domains take away the pagerank/link juice of main website?
Hi all, I would like to know how sub domains will be collaborated with domain or main website in terms of authority, backlinks, link juice, etc...Link juice will be passed to sub domains from domain or vice versa? If there are large number of pages in sub domain, will that going to impact the ranking of main domain? Backlinks of sub domain are going to be a deciding factor for website ranking too? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
What is the appropriate Robot.txt to unblock if Google cannot get all the resources from my homepage?
Hello everyone. I did some research as to why my website has decreased in the Google search rankings recently. After reading this Yoast article I believe it's because the robot.txt files I have set up on my wordpress website. The following is a screen shot of the results of a fetch & render query of my webpage.Googlebot couldn't get all resources for this page. Here's a list: URL Type Reason
Algorithm Updates | | gamesotd
http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:400,600,700,800%7CPT+Sans:400,400italic,700,700italic%7COswald:400,300,700&subset=latin,latin-ext
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-content/plugins/slick-contact-forms/css/admin.css?ver=3.9.1
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-content/plugins/contact-form-plugin/css/style.css?ver=3.9.1
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-content/plugins/hupso-share-buttons-for-twitter-facebook-google/style.css?ver=3.9.1
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-content/plugins/latest-post-accordian-slider/css/lpaccordion.css?ver=3.9.1
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-content/plugins/latest-post-accordian-slider/css/style.css?ver=3.9.1
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-content/plugins/revslider/rs-plugin/css/settings.css?rev=4.1.1&ver=3.9.1
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-content/plugins/revslider/rs-plugin/css/dynamic-captions.css?rev=4.1.1&ver=3.9.1
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-content/plugins/revslider/rs-plugin/css/static-captions.css?rev=4.1.1&ver=3.9.1
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-email-capture/inc/css/wp-email-capture-styles.css?ver=1.0
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-content/themes/infographer/style.css?ver=3.9.1
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-content/themes/infographer/css/stylesheet.min.css?ver=3.9.1
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-content/themes/infographer/css/style_dynamic.php?ver=3.9.1
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-content/themes/infographer/css/custom_css.php?ver=3.9.1
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-content/plugins/convertable-contact-form-builder-analytics-and-lead-management-dashboard/assets/css/convertable.css?ver=3.9.1
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-content/plugins/google-maps-widget/css/gmw.css?ver=1.66
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-content/plugins/acurax-social-media-widget/style.css?ver=3.9.1
Style Sheet
Denied by robots.txt
http://www.kmollinslaw.com/wp-includes/js/swfobject.js?ver=2.2-20120417
Script
Denied by robots.txt
My current robot.txt settings are as follows;
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: */xmlrpc.php
Disallow: */wp-*.php
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: *?wptheme=
Disallow: *?comments=
Disallow: *?replytocom
Disallow: */comment-page-
Disallow: *?s=
Disallow: */wp-content/
Allow: */wp-content/uploads/
```What to I need to allow/disallow to allow Google spiders to properly read my website?
0 -
Google sets brand/domain name at the end of SERP titles
Hi all, I am experiencing that Google puts our domain name at the end of the titles in SERPs. So if ia have a title: "See our super cool website", Google would show "See our super cool website - Betxpert.com" in the SERPs Well. This is okay. Apart from the fact that i myself often put the brand name in the title AND the fact that Google mispells the site name. The brand is BetXpert with a upper case X...so when i get a SERP with "See our super cool website - BetXpert - Betxpert.com" I am annoyed 🙂 Any one out the know how to tell Google the EXACT brand name, such that they do not set a value the site owner does not want to have? -Rasmus
Algorithm Updates | | rasmusbang0 -
So, useless link exchange pages still work?!
After 3 years out of SEO I thought things might have moved on, but apparently not. Bit of back link research and all the top sites in my niche have tons of reciprocal links to barely relevant sites. Do I really have to do this? I mean I thought this was so out of date, it's not much better than keyword stuffing. So, should I just forget my lofty principles asking myself 'is this of any value to my users?' and just take the medicine?
Algorithm Updates | | Cornwall0 -
Why has my homepage been replaced in Google by my Facebook page?
Hi. I was wondering if others have had this happen to them. Lately, I've noticed that on a couple of my sites the homepage no longer appears in the Google SERP. Instead, a Facebook page I've created appears in the position the homepage used to get. My subpages still get listed in Google--just not the homepage. Obviously, I'd prefer that both the homepage and Facebook page appear. Any thoughts on what's going on? Thanks for your help!
Algorithm Updates | | TuxedoCat0 -
Does the use of an underscore in filenames adversely affect SEO
We have had a page which until recently was ranked first or second by Google UK and also worldwide for the term "Snowbee". It is now no longer in the top 50. I ran a page optimization report on the url and had a very good score. The only criticism was that I had used an atypical character in the url. The only unusual character was an underscore "_" We use the underscore in most file names without apparent problems with search engines. In fact they are automatically created in html files by our ecommerce software, and other pages do not seem to have been so adversely affected. Should we discontinue this practice? It will be difficult but I'm sure we can overcome this if this is the reason why Google has marked us down. I attach images of the SEO Report pages 8fDPi.jpg AdLIn.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | FFTCOUK0 -
Stars (Votes) in SERPS
Anyone seen these before? Small stars representing 'votes'? What's all this about?
Algorithm Updates | | MirandaP0