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
-
Does changing text content on a site affects seo?
HI, i have changed some h1 and h2 , changed and added paragraphs,fixed plagiarism,grammar and added some pics with alt text, I have just done it today, I am ranking on second page QUESTION-1 is it gonna affect my 2 months SEO efforts? QUESTION -2 Do I have to submit sitemap to google again? QUESTION-3 does changing content on the site frequently hurts SEO?
Algorithm Updates | | Sam09schulz0 -
Back link plan discussion
When you have a lot of keywords that you rank for say something like 15,000 or more. How do you develop a good back link plan? I was thinking to first look at the highest volume keywords we already rank for but aren't in the top 1-3 spots. To focus on those few words trying to obtain more high quality back links. But I'm not sure if this is the best plan . What would you do? What are some good consistent back link plans you can use to work on a keyword or lots of keywords? Thanks for the discussion, Chris
Algorithm Updates | | Cfarcher1 -
Fresh content..how important to SERP position?
I've heard that fresh content helps boost your position in the serps. If i wrote all new unique content on some of my pages that havent been changed in several years, would i see a boost in the rank? If so, how many positions?
Algorithm Updates | | Ron100 -
Adding the link masking directory to robots.txt?
Hey guys, Just want to know if you have any experience with this. Is it worthwhile blocking search engines from following the link masking directory.. (what i mean by this is the directory that holds the link redirectors to an affiliate site: example:
Algorithm Updates | | irdeto
mydomain.com/go/thislink goes to
amazon.com/affiliatelink I want to know if blocking the 'go' directory from getting crawled in robots.txt is a good idea or a bad idea? I am not using wordpress but rather a custom built php site where i need to manually decide on these things. i want to specifically know if this in any way violates guidelines for google. it doesn't change the custom experience because they know exactly where they will end up if they click on the link. any advice would be much appreciated.0 -
How to you get a company details to appear on the right side of google searches? For example is you type dr martens in google , the search page shows links and then a snippet of the company on the right. Thank you.
For example is you type dr martens in google , the search page shows links and then a snippet of the company on the right. Thank you. https://www.google.com/search?q=dr+martens&oq=dr+martens&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2176j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8
Algorithm Updates | | vijayvasu0 -
Organic SERP CTRs and Universal Search
We have a keyword that we show up in the #1 position for organically. However that number one position is a Maps blended search result and we are the first listing with link, address and phone number. This is a high volume keyword but we receive little traffic from it. Looking in Web Master Tools this is corroborated in showing that for this keyword our average position is 1.7, high volume of impressions but click through rate is 0.04%! Is it possible that people scroll past the first result when it is a Maps blended search result to go to the first "true" organic listing? Has anyone else seen this? Is there anything a website owner can do in this situation to increase CTR for your listing?
Algorithm Updates | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
SERP's & Search Engine Differences
Hey, I recently modified my pages to conform more closely to the "A" page rankings for MOZ's on-page report card but saw declines in my keyword rankings. They keywords in question appear in my title tag, description, one image alt tag, either an h1 or h2 tag, and 4 times throughout the text of the document. I don't think MOZ would recommend these changes if it was seen as stuffing - is there any other reason why my rankings might have dropped by 1-4 positions? Also, does anyone know of a good article/book for Yahoo/Bing SEO? My Yahoo & Bing rankings are far below Google's in most cases. Any help would be appreciated! -Michael
Algorithm Updates | | Stew2220 -
If Google doesn’t know we’re hosted in the UK, does that affect our SERPs?
Hi, In November 2011 our eCommerce website dropped from between 3rd and 4th position in the UK SERPs down to 7th and 8th. A year after this happened, we still haven’t moved back up to the original ranking despite all our best efforts and we’re looking for a bit of insight into what could have happened. One of our theories is this, do you think it might be the problem? In October 2011 we moved from a single-site custom built CMS hosted in the UK to a multi-site custom built CMS hosted on a much better server based in the UK. As part of this move we started using CloudFlare to help with security and performance (CloudFlare is a security CDN). Because CloudFlare’s servers are in the US, to the outside world it almost looks like we went from a slow hosting company in the UK to a much quicker hosting company in the US. Could this have affected our rankings? We know that Google takes the server IP address into account as a ranking factor, but as far as we understand it’s because they (rightly) believe that a server closer to the user will perform better. So a UK server will serve up pages quicker to a visitor in the UK than a US server because the data has a shorter distance to travel. However, we’re definitely not experiencing an issue with being recognised as a UK website. We have a .co.uk domain (which is obviously a big indicator) and if you click on “Pages from the UK” in the SERPs we jump up to 3rd place. So Google seems to know we’re a UK site. Is the fact we’re using CloudFlare and hence hiding our real server IP address – is this penalising us in the SERPs? Currently out of the 6 websites above us, 4 are in the US and 2 are in the UK. All of these are massive sites with lots of links, so smaller ranking factors might be more important for us. Obviously the big downside of not using CloudFlare is that our site becomes much less secure and it becomes much slower. Images and some static content is distributed via a local CloudFlare server, which means it should tick Google’s box in terms of providing a quick site for users. CloudFlare say in a blog post that they used to have Google crawl rates and geo-tagging issues in the past when they were just starting out, but in 2010 they started working with “the big search engines” to make sure they treated CloudFlare like a CDN (so special rules that apply to Akamai also apply to CloudFlare). Since they’ve been working with Google, CloudFlare say that their customers will only see a positive SEO impact. So at the moment we’re at a loss about what happened to our ranking. Google say they take IP’s into account for ranking, but by using CloudFlare it looks like we’re in the US. We definitely know we’re not having geo-tagging issues and CloudFlare say they’re working with Google to ensure its customers aren't seeing a negative impact by using CloudFlare, but a niggling part of us still wonders whether it could impact our SEO. Many thanks, James
Algorithm Updates | | OptiBacUK0