About Us in the Footer
-
For our new site we created a simple navigational footer. The development team wants to put a short "About Us" paragraph with relevant links to our products or services.
I know putting footer links for the search engines is a big no-no, but is this different because it's meant for the users convenience?
This is an image of our unfinished footer: https://www.diigo.com/item/image/3vpdp/jihw Are there any other changes we should implement?
Thanks!
-
Hi Rachel,
If you're planning to put an About Us description with relevant links, with the aim of driving visitors to your product pages, I would recommend you putting it somewhere above the fold instead of putting it in the footer. The footer is the last thing the user will see when visiting your website, and is probably a better place to put links which are less important.
An exception to this I can think of is if you are running a blog where the latest posts play a more important role. In that case, putting an About Us description in the footer (e.g. Copyblogger) will be wise.
-
Yes.
It's the first thing I read on the page that tells me what they do.
I could have gone to an "About Us" page, "Our Mission" or "Our Guarantee" page and got the same/similar or something less informative.
In the process, they're also sending their homepage authority to pages they value.
The link to the sitemap is the least helpful link in that paragraph.
-
Even though it's there for linking purposes only?
-
Hi Rachel,
The "Did You Know" paragraph does not appear to be in the footer.
I clicked on a category and a couple of products and the content is not there, so it is not run-of-site.
The footer will appear on every page of a site.
I don't have a problem at all with the "Did You Know" paragraph on the homepage.
-
Thanks for responding.
The other links in the footer are not in the main navigation bar on our site (Terms of service, wholesalers, about us...). But the links that we will be putting into the about us paragraph are for specific best selling products we want our users to buy that are part of our main navigation funnel.
Take a look at this site: http://www.brickhousesecurity.com/ it's a very nice site but the paragraph close to the footer comes across as a bit spammy. This is something the development team is interested in. Is this considered going against best practices?
-
If the links are relevant to users to navigate the site, how is that any different than the other links you show there in the footer?
I think your concern stems from when someone buys a link on another site and it is put in the footer across the site. That is a different situation and generally a no-no. That has to do with external links.
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
-
Links in Webmaster Tools that aren't really linking to us
I've noticed that there is a domain in WMT that Google says is linking to our domain from 173 different pages, but it actually isn't linking to us at all on ANY of those pages. The site is a business directory that seems to be automatically scraping business listings and adding them to hundreds of different categories. Low quality crap that I've disavowed just in case. I have hand checked a bunch of the pages that WMT is reporting with links to us by viewing source, but there's no links to us. I've also used crawlers to check for links, but they turn up nothing. The pages do, however, mention our brand name. I find this very odd that Google would report links to our site when there isn't actually links to our site. Has anyone else ever noticed something like this?
Technical SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
Keyword links in footer
Hi - I am trying to help a site to get out from under a Google manual action penalty - down as "Partial Matches - Unnatural Links to site".
Technical SEO | | StevieD
I am checking through their links - the site that links most to them is a local directory style site - it has 2,682 links back into 1 page (Home) The directory site was built by the web co. that built my clients' site and they put a keyword link in the footer of the directory site - the keyword was "Buy Truffles". All my instincts say that is a bad thing! But - this is what is perplexing me - they are ranking no.1 for that keyword! Whereas they have lost rankings (i.e. not top 50) for all the other keywords they were targeting. So I don't get it! Can anyone explain why this is. I feel I should I get that link removed but don't want to take out their only ranking keyword! Webmaster shows about 55 different pages in the directory site have a link back to my client. Hope you can help.
Cheers - Steve0 -
Site Ranking Ahead of Us - Why?
I don't want to give details, but a competitor's site ranks ahead of us by a spot or 2 for some of our major keywords, and we can't figure out why. We have more content indexed, we have better content (my opinion), we're better optimized, we have significantly better MozRank and Majestic rankings, we have more links, we have better links. They have a plain Jane Wordpress blog, and their pages don't even have 300 characters. They don't have any awesome links. There are plenty of other sites besides ours that should outrank them. When I am using the various tools at my disposal, I can see why a competitor outranks us. I'm not obsessing, but this one, I just don't understand. Has anyone had this experience?
Technical SEO | | CsmBill0 -
While SEOMoz currently can tell us the number of linking c-blocks, can SEOMoz tell us what the specific c-blocks are?
I know it is important to have a diverse set of c-blocks, but I don't know how it is possible to have a diverse set if I can't find out what the c-blocks are in the first place. Also, is there a standard for domain linking c-blocks? For instance, I'm not sure if a certain amount is considered "average" or "above-average."
Technical SEO | | Todd_Kendrick0 -
UK and US subdomain. Can both rank for some keyword terms?
One of my clients has one root domain http://www.website.com and there are two versions, the US and the UK. So there are two subdomains uk.website.com and us.website.com. Both subdomains contain similar content/landing pages and are going after the same keywords. One site is supposedly crawled by UK crawlers but still shows up in US-based SERPS. Will Google take into account that both subdomains are going for the same keyword terms and only rank one of them? How is this kind of thing handled?
Technical SEO | | C-Style0 -
Duplicate content issues with australian and us version of website
Good afternoon. I've tried searching for an answer to the following question but I believe my circumstance is a little different than what has been asked in the past. I currently run a Australian website targeted at a specific demographic (50-75) and we produce a LARGE number of articles on a wide variety of lifestyle segments. All of our focus up until now has been in Australia and our SEO and language is dedicated towards this. The next logical step in my mind is to launch a mirror website targeted at the US market. This website would be a simple mirror of a large number of articles (1000+) on subjects such as Food, Health, Travel, Money and Technology. Our current CMS has no problems in duplicating the specific items over and sharing everything, the problem is in the fact that we currently use a .com.au domain and the .com domain in unavailable and not for sale, which would mean we have to create a new name for the US targeted domain. The question is, how will mirroring this information, targeted towards US, affect us on Google and would we better off getting a large number of these articles 're-written' by a company on freelancer.com etc? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Geelong
Drew0 -
Too many footer links?
Hi. We're working on http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/ at the moment, and I was wondering what's everyone's opinion on footer links. There's quite a lot on the page, and I was wondering if there might be a few too many. If so, what would be the best plan of action? Remove them altogether, stick them in an iframe or in a bit of JS so they can't be crawled? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | neooptic0