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
-
How to block index of link and content
Hi, We have pages where articles are shown and in the sides we have small snippets of Articles which shows the title and close to 25 words and a image. When i search for something in Google the snippet image and content is shown and in Google when clicked it redirects to a page which is not meant to be shown for the keyword the visitor is querying Is there a way i can block all the links and content shown in the right and left side of the page so Google does not get confused with the page content thats not related to that page? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | AlexisWithers0 -
Is moving text out of the main body field a bad idea for SEO?
Hi, I manage this WordPress website http://www.the-fireplace-company.co.uk I've been looking for ways to improve the product template and have come up with the following http://www.the-fireplace-company.co.uk/product/the-alhambra-fireplace/ - you can see how this compares to the old template http://www.the-fireplace-company.co.uk/product/the-burlington-fireplace/ Basically I've moved the description copy for the product from the main body to an alternative field and disabled the reviews tab below the product images to give a more compact feel and better use of the space available in my humble opinion! The client approves too. However I was just about the change all the other products to match this one - but suddenly thought is is wise to move all text out of the main body just to improve the look? I wondered what impact this might have on search. Any pointers would be welcomed. One course of action might be to find a new theme that's just a little more accommodating! Or to develop this theme further to ensure the main body copy is displayed where I want it to be? Regards to the Moz community - thanks for reading. Nathan
On-Page Optimization | | nathangdavidson0 -
Internal keyword linking - short or long string
I've seen a couple of people leave comments about keyword linking being too specific. If I"m doing a lot of internal keyword linking and I want to rank well for 'widgets', is it better that most of the links just use the word 'widgets' or should some of the links have more words in them. ie: 'red and blue widgets' - 'buy these widgets online' etc.
On-Page Optimization | | sparrowdog0 -
Too many on page links in sitemap.html
My crawl report is flagging an issue with too many links to one of my pages, this page is my sitemap.html. However, I have coded the page so that if required is specified it generates an .xml version of the page and if not then the html version is displayed. What is the best way to stop the crawl finding the html version whilst maintaining it on the site for clients navigation?
On-Page Optimization | | SamPenno0 -
23000 Links are not found- Should I redirect them?
Hi I have been deleting product links from my website but never redirect them. On my google webmaster, it shows there is total 23000 products are not found. Should I redirect them all back to the home page? For the pages with soft 404 response.. should I also redirect those original URL back to home page ? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ilovebodykits0 -
Should I link my 3 E-Commerce sites?
Good Morning, I have 3 E-Commerce sites that all sell the same products, but have unique content on them (unique text, unique urls, same products).... Up until now, I have not put any links from one to any of the others... I just started to wonder about that since these are all related to the same industry, and are owned by 1 company, what would be the downside to linking them... Does anyone have any advice on if I should link to each site from the other 2 sites? Also, if you think I should be linking them, please advise how you would do it (on which pages, how many links, anchor texts, etc...) Thanks a lot!
On-Page Optimization | | Prime850 -
I have 2 canonical links. Must get rid of one?
On my wordpress blog, i have 2 canonical links for every single post, like this: One is generated by wordpress theme: rel='canonical' href='http://site.com/article-title/' /> The other one is generated by AllinOne seo pack: <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">http://site.com/article-title/</a>" /> I tried to remove one of them, but if i uncheck from AllinOne, the source code is the same. Also, on-page analysis from SeoMoz tells me that i need only one canonical link. I don't have errors in Google Webmater Tools. What should I do?
On-Page Optimization | | Vladone800 -
Change in link structure due to Joomla
Hi, I have been using Joomla 1.5 until recently and the link structure would be something like - http://www.guru99.com/software-testing.html Now with Joomla 1.7 , ".html " automatically stripped and the URL become "http://www.guru99.com/software-testing" My site is due upgrade but ".html" part is a concern. Once I upgrade , Can I re-direct all ".hmtl" url like http://www.guru99.com/software-testing.html to non ".html" url like "http://www.guru99.com/software-testing" Will this ensure all the link juice is passed ? I have more than 350 URL in my site ... Please guide ... Cheers Krishna PS = the link http://www.guru99.com/software-testing will not work since the site is yet to be upgraded
On-Page Optimization | | iamnew0