Site Footer Links Used for Keyword Spam
-
I was on the phone with a proposed web relaunch firm for one of my clients listening to them talk about their deep SEO knowledge. I cannot believe that this wouldn’t be considered black-hat or at least very Spammy in which case a client could be in trouble.
On this vendor’s site I notice that they stack the footer site map with about 50 links that are basically keywords they are trying to rank for. But here’s the kicker shown by way of example from one of the themes in the footer:
9 footer links:
Top PR Firms
Best PR Firms
Leading PR Firms
CyberSecurity PR Firms
Cyber Security PR Firms
Technology PR Firms
PR Firm
Government PR Firms
Public Sector PR FirmsEach link goes to a unique URL that is basically a knock-off of the homepage with a few words or at the most one sentences swapped out to include this footer link keyword phrase, sometimes there is a different title attribute but generally they are a close match to each other.
The canonical for each page links back to itself.
I simply can’t believe Google doesn’t consider this Spammy.
Interested in your view.
Rosemary -
Thanks everyone. I sure don't intend to use this tactic because it looks awful on a website and I would hate to have Google decide it was spammy .
Rosemary
-
Definitely a risky tactic.
What I would do is to:-
- Create a blog and add content optimised around the different keywords.
- Enhance the homepage to give Google more of an idea of what the site is about
- Create proper landing pages for some of the main keywords, maybe with case studies, content, services offered etc
You may also find some of those keywords not necessary or too low search volume/competitive to worry about. As you said Google semantic search is very intelligent, It would treat Top PR Firms & Best PR Firms as basically the same slightly favouring one or the other for an exact match. There again if you have high enough authority that will be outweighed.
-
I see a lot of it Rosemary. You'd think it would be penalised but it actually appears to work quite well for some. I see some agencies with stacks of keywords in the footer, in fairness, generally they do link to landing pages with plenty of good content and they are getting results.
I think that having a few linking to high quality pages is something that works quite well. Having loads linking to poor quality pages is not good and also is rubbish from a UX perspective.
-
In addition, with symantic search Google knows that these two phrases are the same:
CyberSecurity PR Firms
Cyber Security PR FirmsThey also do the same with Cybersecurity agency or firm.
Imagine telling a client to have all these individual landing pages!
-
This is definitely an old-school tactic that used to work, but doesn't work as much anymore. My opinion is that this particular tactic is not working too well for them anymore, but they haven't updated those sections. The funniest part is that they have "CyberSecurity PR Firms" & "Cyber Security PR Firms" pages to capture the tiny nuance in spelling.
From what I've witnessed, landing pages built with SEO in mind do still work, and can be a best practice, but not to the degree that this firm is doing it. They should combine a lot of those pages, build out the content a lot more on each page to make each page genuinely useful, and improve links, social shares, and CRO on each page if they really want to improve those. Just doing a quick search of the "Cyber Security PR Firms" term I didn't see any site in the top few results that looked like the one you're talking about, so it seems that this isn't working for them
So the answer isn't black and white. It's not about having 50 keyword targeted pages vs nothing at all. If you look at HubSpot, they have a lot of landing pages that focus on their software's features, such as https://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing-automation. Or Zapier's many app pages https://zapier.com/zapbook/.
At one point I thought this tactic was completely gone, but if done well it can do a lot of good!
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
-
Hlp with site setup
Hi there and thanks for the great information, certainly lots to take in. Can anyone suggest the best way to setup product / category url structure for a store? At the moment we have something like domainname.com/parentcategory/subcategory/product name.html As the product url, we edited url structure using a plugin, we don't use default WooCommerce url settings. domainname.com/parentcategory/subcategory/product name.html. this can sometimes be long But when you click on the product the url changes to the following. domainname.com/product name.html. This can shorted the url by 40% and still have keyword in url Is there any benefit in doing his? Re canonical urls, I only have about 15 products that are selected in many categories.the other 200 are under once category only. Product pages don't have many backlinks at the moment. Thanking you so much.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IvanaDaulay0 -
SEO Links in Footer?
Hi, One of my clients uses a pretty powerful SEO tool, won't mention the name. They now have a "link equity" tool, which they are using on a lot of their client's sites, which include tons of fortune 500 companies. It involves add footer links to your site that change based on the content of the page they are on. The machine learning tries to figure out the most related pages and links to them with the heading tag of that page as the anchor text. Initially this sounds very spammy to me. But then, it seems a lot like "related products" tools that many companies use. The goal for this tool is to build up internal linking, especially for deeper pages on their site. They have over 10,000 currently. What are everyone's thoughts on this strategy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vetofunk2 -
Back links to pages on our site that don't exist on forums we haven't used with irrelevant product anchor text
Hi, I have a recurring issue that I can't find a reason for. I have a website that has over 7k backlinks that I monitor quite closely. Each month there are additional links on third party forums that have no relevance to the site or subject matter that are as a result toxic. Our clients site is a training site yet these links are appearing on third party sites like http://das-forum-der-musik.de/mineforum/ and have anchor text with "UGG boots for sale" to pages on our url listed as /mensuggboots.html that obviously don't exist. Each month, I try to contact the site owners and then I add them to Google using the disavow tool. Two months later they are gone and then are replaced with new backlinks on a number of different forum websites. Quite random but always relating to UGG boots. There are at least 100 extra links each month. Can anyone suggest why this is happening? Has anyone seen this kind of activity before? Is it possibly black hat SEO being performed by a competitor? I just don't understand why our URL is listed. To be fair, there are other websites linked to using the same terms that aren't ours and are also of a different theme so I don't understand what the "spammer" is trying to achieve. Any help would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rufo
KInd Regards
Steve0 -
Exact match domain - should i use one
i have the domain "region"familyholidays.co.uk for an upcoming site. i was pleased as its memorable and tells the user what its about. i am targetting keywords such as: region family holidays region family hotels region famliy cottages region family campsites is it something i should avoid because of potential penalties. i will be adding plenty of good content and doing all the offsite things but dont want to start with a handicap with an emd? thanks neil
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | neilhenderson0 -
How do you change the 6 links under your website in Google?
Hello everyone, I have no idea how to ask this question, so I'm going to give it a shot and hopefully someone can help me!! My company is called Eteach, so when you type in Eteach into Google, we come in the top position (phew!) but there are 6 links that appear underneath it (I've added a picture to show what I mean). How do you change these links?? I don't even know what to call them, so if there is a particular name for these then please let me know! They seem to be an organic rank rather than PPC...but if I'm wrong then do correct me! Thanks! zorIsxH.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Is guest posting good for main link-building tactic for eCommerce site
Hello, Is guest posting going to be devalued? We've been offering a guest post with one link in the body pointing towards one of our articles, and one home page link in the bio. We're looking at doing this as the main link building strategy. Is this still a good idea now and in the future? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Bad links showing up in opensiteexplorer
Hello Everybody,I've been working as an inhouse SEO for nearly a year and a half now and i've gotten some pretty great results. Two years ago our site was on the second page for the most important keywords in our niche and with a lot of work we've managed to get top 5 rankings for most keywords and even the number 1 spot for the most important keywords. I've been using opensite explorer to track backlinks and today i noticed that a lot of links we're discovered in the last week from websites that i did not recognize. Most url's won't even load properly because each "blogpost" has over a thousand comments. It took me a couple of tries to even find one that loaded properly and find the link to our website, and it was really there. There haven't been any drops in our rankings but i'm worried about a possible spam penalty. I know that i can use the disavow tool to at least disavow the links from these domains, but is that really the only thing i can do? Furthermore these are just the links that opensiteexplorer picked up, who knows how many more are out there.For any of you questioning wether or not i did this to myself, I'm no saint, but I'm definitely not stupid enough to buy these kinds of links. any help would be highly appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Laurensvda0 -
What are some of the worst links that you have come across?
I'm talking the least relevant and incredibly spammy. We've all done site audits and stumbled across some ridiculous ones. The funnier the better. I'm compiling a list of hilarious links that sites have gotten. Any input would be great!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KevinBloom0