Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Footer Links And Link Juice
-
I'm starting to learn about link juice and notice in GWMT > Traffic > Internal Links, that the list is in this order by the links counted on each page. Some are in the footer and some are in the header, with some being more important than others commercially i.e. /register
/privacy
/terms
/search
/sitemap
/disclaimer
/blog
/register
So I am wondering if I should add a 'no-follow' attribute to the footer links i.e. privacy, terms, disclaimer and leave the others as they are? Does this help retain link juice on each page where the links appear? Or am I missing the point all together?
This is my website: http://goo.gl/CN0e5
-
there are ways around it though such as obfuscated javascript linking and other methods of making a link unrecognized as a link
-
Fair point about disrupting the flow, I will leave the footer links as they are.
Some of the links are at the top of the page with Register being a call to action.
Thx.
-
Hmmmm.... a search form has been on my mind as I would track what people enter and then include them in my keyword research. Top tip!!
-
Thanks for the link, this video answered a few of my niggles about footer links!
-
Just to add to the consensus (although credit goes to multiple people on the thread) - PR-sculpting with nofollow on internal links no longer works, and it can be counter-productive. If these links are needed for users, don't worry about them, and don't disrupt PR flow through your site. Ultimately, you're only talking about a few pages, and @sprynewmedia is right - Google probably discounts footer links even internally (although we may no good way to measure this).
Be careful with links like "register", though, because sometimes they spin off URL variations, and you don't want those all indexed. In that case, you'd probably want to NOINDEX the target page - it just doesn't have any search value. I'm not seeing that link in your footer, though, so I'm not clear on what it does. I see this a lot with "login" links.
-
A no-follow, in terms of juice, would actually hurt your goals as the link still gets allocated the juice portion but it doesn't flow through. **Each no-follow link will siphon off a little juice. **
See http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569
The effects of navigational links are diminished somewhat as Google treats them differently compared to content links. To help solidify this, surround the footer with
<nav></nav>
tags.
Review: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links #5
Generally, remove any site wide links that aren't always needed and place them on page where users would like the details. For instance, use a search form instead of a link to the search page.
-
No this won't work. it's called pagerank sculpting and used to work but Google fixed that a couple of years ago by making the nofollow counts as a link and instead all you are doing is throwing away your page juice.
-
Hi there,
John Doherty did a really good whiteboard friday on this last year:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday
-
You could add a noindex if you think the privacy and disclaimer pages, etc, are not bringing any SEO value. Nofollow would block search engines from even spidering them. But a noindex would just stop it from showing up as an entrance/landing page in the SERPs.
I wouldn't say that it helps "retain link juice", but it might help you to show the search engines what your most important pages are.
An alternative would be to perhaps only link to some of those pages from your home page and not from every single page. Are there any pages that you think would be appropriate NOT to link to all those pages? If so, perhaps you can write a conditional statement in your code to only show those links on some pages and not others.
Scott O.
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
-
Spammy links
Hi Guys, I have a case which seems to occur more often for our customers. The websites of our customers seem to receive tons of backlinks from websites all over the world (China, Russia, Ukrain, etc). It’s spam we never asked for, we didn’t buy any dodgy linkbuilding packages or anything. Do any of you guys have experience with this matter? We try to disavow the links but it takes too much time and we will never manage to disavow 100% of all links. Examples are www.keukensduitsland.nl and www.m2beveiliging.nl Hope anyone has experience and maybe even solutions for this matter. Thanks!
Link Building | | Happy-SEO1 -
Do branded footer links hurt me?
I run a small seo company. We work uber white hat. We are small with only 4 of us but we have a good client base with great results. My question is related to my own websites because they are the only sites in which I practice this technique. I just watched the white board Friday about good vs bad link building. In the bad link building it mentioned never to externally link in the footer. Is this an all around statement? For instance, every new site we make we always put links in the footer of our clients. Usually says something like "Developed by Stodzy Internet marketing Almost all the web design companies I work with do the same thing. Is this going to help me or hurt me?
Link Building | | SwanJob2 -
Link Detox and Link Removal
I have a question about which links to remove after running a link detox from Link Research Tools. First a little back story. I had had an SEO company link building for one of the websites I own. But I have recently stopped working with them. In the last month my rankings have near dropped off the charts. I have just recently gotten access to Google webmaster tools and noticed an unnatural link warning from back in March. So yesterday I ran link detox and it reported 19 toxic links, 120 suspicious links, and 24 healthy links. It's rather obvious that I should remove all of the toxic links. They all from sites that have been deindexed by google. But my question is a about the suspicious links. What should my criteria be for removing them? Am I better off removing them all and leaving my site with only 24 healthy links or should I personally comb through them and remove only the worst of the worst so that I leave my site with a few more links? I'd really like to get the site ready to resubmit to google as soon as I can. Thoughts? yyCOf.png
Link Building | | CobraJones950 -
Link Removal Services
I have seen a number of these services pop up over the past few months. My question is, has anyone used them, and did you see any results? Here is a few example of the ones I have seen appear recently http://www.removeem.com/ http://www.linkremovalservices.com/ http://deletebacklinks.com/ http://www.linkdelete.com/
Link Building | | EwanFisher0 -
Etsy.com --Getting link juice through other pages on search results?
My sister has a store page on etsy.com where she sells home made crafts. And I want to help her rank higher on google with some of the other etsy stores. So i started to look at the other etsy store pages that are ranking well on google and found that they have a page authority between 48 to 52. So i looked at the backlinks of the ones ranking well on google with high page authority and found that many of their best links came from the internal search results page on etsy.com, and some only had one link from just an arbitrary etsy.com search page. I'm thinking this is because another product being listed on the seach page has a high page authority which then passes some of its link juice onto every other product on the page. But what is interesting is products are always being sold or getting added so even though you are on a search results page that happens to benifit from the link juice of another product the next time the page gets crawled you will be on a different search page. So i am thinking in order to maintain high page authority to you just have to have a lot of products listed so that there is a greater likely hood that you will find yourself on the same search page as another high authority page. I have not been doing SEO very long so i would love to hear what others think. I really have no idea, am i on the right track with this? (edited post) Thanks
Link Building | | doug5650 -
Do links within imbeddable widgets carry link juice?
I'm dipping my toes into infographic design. On of my desired outcomes is to gain links by having other sites embed my graphic. I'm considering using Tableau's interactive data visualization software to do so; thus creating a widget, embedding it on my blog, and including the embed code for others to post. Is it possible to include a juice passing link in such an infographic? I know its possible to include links inside the tableau graphic but not sure if they have straight SEO value. If these links are not juice passing would it be better to go with a simple image link that passes value?
Link Building | | JesseCWalker1 -
How many links per week is too fast in link building?
For a new website/blog how many links per week looks suspicious or hurt the rankings?
Link Building | | aaran1 -
Link Frequency
I understand that good link building is all about the quality of the link / the anchor text attached to it. But, what about frequency? Should I build until I can't build anymore? or create a plan to submit links to a certain # of sites per week/month?
Link Building | | pricefutures0