Are My footer links bad?
-
I started working here recently, they said the footer links were to help with navigation of their most popular products. I am curious after reading http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond if having these footer links could hurt the ranking of those key words after the penguin update. I am looking more into the analytics, and have not seen a negative impact yet.
-
Ok Dorm i will answer you there.
-
Thanks,
I just sent you a private message about it. Please let me know if you have any more questions.
-
Hi Dorm
Footer links or the interlinking are only for the end user navigation helps so if user likes it or use it then google will also likes it. Your homepage are very much interlinked with lots of keywords under the section "Popular Motorcycle, ATV, Dirt Bike, UTV Parts and Accessories" which are not good according to my experience. Brand section on the homepage are OK. Its good if you only give a link on brand name itself instead of keywords for JakeWilson.com. Also there is no need of putting "Take a look at our most popular areas" section in footer.
Also i would suggest you to put Title tag with 10 - 60 characters, no special characters.
If you need more help for any suggestions then you can PM me or ask here.
-
So if we have another site focused on one section of our business and it links to our mains site you would advise not to have it in the footer unless it is a now follow?
-
_What I believe is that if the purpose of keeping links in the footer is to make it easier for your visitors to find related information, keep it. It is not going to hurt you. Just keep the number to a logical limit and you will just be fine. However, to be on the safe side, if you are cross linking, you can add “nofollow” attribute against the links. _
-
I know some that having to many exact anchor text is bad; however, having them in the footer of the site i thought did not matter as much, and google knows they are a footer link and to not give them to much value.
Thoughts?
-
Pointing to other sites is just leaking PR to those sites and taking users off of your site and onto theirs. Might want to find out their reasoning behind doing that.
Keep in mind that your footer links are global so adding the main target to each of the links can cause an over optimization issue. For example:
hefty brand garbage bags
glad garbage bags
noname garbage bags
etc. too much repetition of "garbage bags in anchor texts globally could trigger a ranking suppression for that main keyword.
-
They have about 10 of their most popular and another 8 pointing to their other sites most popular too.
-
How many links are in your footer? If there are 30+ I would try trimming it down a bit, anything less you should be fine. But ask yourself this: Is every footer link you have benefitting the user of the website? If not, get rid of them. If you are using your footer links as an SEO tactic, you should probably take a step back and re-think your strategy.
Footer links in my opinion are perfectly fine when used in moderation and they provide value to the user.
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
-
Automated checking for broken links within content pieces
Hi, I am wondering if anyone can send me in the right direction on a system suggestion. We have currently grown out amount of content pieces on our website and our manual checking if the links in the content pieces are still 200 status is becoming extremely time consuming. Does anyone have a recommendation of a system that will crawl your pages and check both the internal and external links within the content for a status code (404,200,etc)? Preferably something server side so it can just run on a schedule but really anything would be fine. I have tried things like Screaming frog, etc and it just doesn't seem to be the right tool.
On-Page Optimization | | GoAbroadKP0 -
Inbound Linking from your own sites
Good evening, On each of the sites I have made, I have a link with the anchor text 'Build and Design by Christoper Davies' to my own website. This link is in the footer of every page each of all the sites. Should I have a 'no follow' rel added to these links, or does linking from all the sites (on all pages) help my ranking? I am concerned that having so many inbound links from the same sites, with the same anchor text may be doing me more damage than good.
On-Page Optimization | | chrisdavieswebdesign0 -
Links to Paywall from Content Pages
Hi, My site is funded by subscriptions. We offer lengthy excerpts, and then direct people to a single paywall page, something like domain.com/subscribe/ This means that most pages on the site links to /subscribe, including all of the high value pages that bring people in from Google. This is a page with an understandably high bounce rate, as most users are not interested in paying for content on the web. My question is are we being penalized in Google for having so many internal links to a page with a very high bounce rate? If anyone has worked with paywall sites before and knows the best practices for this, I'd be really grateful to learn more.
On-Page Optimization | | enotes0 -
Duplicate links from forum what to do?
After a crawl it found over 5k errors and over 5k warnings. Those are: Duplicate page content; Duplicate page title; Overly-Dynamic URLs; Missing Meta descr; Title Element too long. All those come from domain.com/forum/ I don't need SEO on forum so what should I do? What could be an easy solution to this? No index? No follow? Please help
On-Page Optimization | | OVJ0 -
Will adding affiliate links negatively affect my SEO?
I'm thinking of signing up to a couple of affiliate programs related to my industry. Will adding affiliate links at the bottom of articles for example negatively affect my seo? I intend to have lots of useful content on my site and not just affililate links.
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
404 link | How to remove the link so it is not found?
My report has listed a few links with 404 errors. They are internal links but are not found. Is there a way to remove that link so it is not found again? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | SavingSense0 -
Links from my homepage
I am redesigning my homepage completely. What criteria should I use to decide which pages to link to from the homepage?
On-Page Optimization | | mascotmike0 -
Randomly Generated Links & Passing PageRank
Hi all, If you were to have links that were randomly generated on each refresh, how would they be treated? I would imagine that they are treated normally and isolated to each crawl. So Google would just see the link structure changing from crawl to crawl and therefore give no long term value to these links. Any ideas? Thanks for your responses! Nick
On-Page Optimization | | NickPateman810