Navigation Links in Footer
-
What are your thoughts about navigation links in the footer? For example: www.chasepaymentech.com - good, bad, or indifferent for SEO?
-
Footer links can definitely be used to enhance user experience and as Steven Ferrino said, "flatten out you site for Google" It is a place where you want to include a sitemap map as well as any other pages that you do not want to necessarily have on your main nav bar.
As far as SEO purposes, this will not really benefit you. I can not say that it won't be of any help, but in my opinion those links are not really optimized and as always, it is better to have in body anchor text links versus bottom footer links.
Best of Luck!
-
I agree. I do it for the user, not for Google, which I think is what Mr. Cutts says to do all the time.
-
One thing to know is that Google often devalues footer links, so while it's usually not a problem to have links in the footer, don't expect them to bring you lots of linkjuice love.
-
Awesome, thank you! I hadn't even thought of that from the user perspective.
-
Thanks so much! I've heard conflicting information about it - a couple of sources said that having all those links in the footer might look spammy to the search engine.
-
Another reason for doing it is for the user experience. They no longer have to scroll back up to the top to change pages. The one problem that I ran into was having too many links on one page by doing this, I fixed it by using an iframe instead. It looks the same, and still provides the linking to the user that I wanted.
-
There are many good reasons to have navigation links in the footer. For example, there might be lower priority pages on your site that are important enough that you still want to flow some link juice to them. Additionally, a homepage link to your HTML sitemap can be a good way to flatten your site architecture, but you usually don't want to put the sitemap link in the header navigation.
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
-
We´re in trouble with our on site internal link optimization - please help
Dear Moz community, We have made a great mistake. Looking at keyword search volumes somehow Moz showed volumes for two keywords which only differentiate by an '**s (plural) as same. **Now we optimized our internal links (all links have the keyword) for the singular word. Now looking at other search volume estimations from competitors we see, that the plural has 5 times bigger volume. Our issue: If we change some of the category links now to another keyword, we will loose our ranking with the singular word. Correct? If we do not change any of our internal links, we will never rank in top 6 with the keyword. (currently singular is 6 and plural is 15) What would you reccomend?
On-Page Optimization | | advertisingcloud0 -
Cross-linking for mobile SEO
Hi everyone! I am having a hard time finding information about weather to/how to apply internal seo linking to mobile versions of sites. We decided to go with dynamic serving with user agent detection. Our desktop site has a quite heavy seo-internal-cross-linking. As I understand, for mobile we should simplify and focus on usability, so get rid of unnecessary links. But I have a doubt about weather removing this part of the web structure can hurt our SEO. Do Google mobile bots look at and rank mobile versions of pages from scratch or do they use what they know about the site and the site's structure from its desktop version?
On-Page Optimization | | ofertia0 -
Spammy link for each keyword
Some people believe that having a link for each keyword and a page of content for each keyword (300+ words) can help ranking for those keywords. However, the old approach of having "restaurant New York", "restaurant Buffalo", "restaurant Newark" approach has become seen as a terrible SEO practice. I don't know whether this was because it's spammy or because people usually combined it with thin content that was 95% duplicate. Which brings us to; http://hungryhouse.co.uk/ Why does such a major company have the following on the site (see the footer); Aberdeen Takeaway Birmingham Takeaway Brighton Takeaway Bristol Takeaway Cambridge Takeaway Canterbury Takeaway Cardiff Takeaway Coventry Takeaway Edinburgh Takeaway Glasgow Takeaway Leeds Takeaway Leicester Takeaway Liverpool Takeaway London Takeaway Manchester Takeaway Newcastle Takeaway Nottingham Takeaway Sheffield Takeaway Southampton Takeaway York Takeaway Indian Takeaway Chinese Takeaway Thai Takeaway Italian Takeaway Cantonese Takeaway Pizza Delivery Sushi Takeaway Kebab Takeaway Fish and Chips Sandwiches Do they know something I don't? [unnecessary links removed by staff]
On-Page Optimization | | JamesFx0 -
Google Maps API as primary navigation
Is it okay for SEO to have a google maps api as the primary source of navigation? For example, have people find locations on a map instead of links to them. I'm wondering how/if Google views this method, kinda like how Google can't read images. Will Google realize that these pages are linked to from the homepage gmaps API?
On-Page Optimization | | terran0 -
Page Shaping - No Follow Links
It's my understanding that adding a nofollow tag to pages that aren't of significance to users can help with page shaping and directing google to the most important links on my home page. I have 4 links on my home page that I'm considering adding a nofollow tag to: Privacy Policy, Legal Policy, Anti-Trust Policy, and Help-Desk Because these links are in the footer on every page I think they're probably sucking up some useful link juice. It's doubtful that anyone would actually search for our privacy policy or legal policy to find our site. I'd rather the juice to spread to other pages of use. What do you guys recommend?
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0 -
Nofollow all outgoing links?
If nofollow keeps link juice from leaking from a site, why not use nofollow on all external links? What would be the benefit of an external link that does not use nofollow? Best, Christopher
On-Page Optimization | | ChristopherGlaeser0 -
How would you handle network header links?
Some companies have a lot of sites covering various topics, for example, http://ninemsn.com.au/. Each category also have dropdown menus where there are more links, taking their pages to well over 100 links. Should these headers be implemented in javascript? Is there a list of best practices somewhere when dealing with a lot of network sites? I'd prefer to reduce the number of links, but sometimes company policies don't allow this. Any suggestions or tips would be helpful.
On-Page Optimization | | bigpond0 -
Number of links in breadcrumb
Does google take the number of links in breadcrumb as a indicator to the depth of the page in the site structure? That will mean that a page with 5 links in the breadcrumb is a page very far away from the index, therefore a less important page.
On-Page Optimization | | seo.academy0
