Link conundrum - losing nav/footer links in mobile view
-
Hi Moz folks! I'm currently moving a site from being hosted on www. and m. separately to a responsive single URL. The problem is, the desktop version currently has links to important landing pages in the footer (about 60) and that's not something we want to replicate on mobile (mainly because it will look pretty awful.)
There is no navigation menu because the key to the homepage is to convert users to subscription so any distraction reduces conversion rate.
The footer links will continue to exist on the desktop view but, since Google's mobile-first index, presumably we lose these important homepage links to our most important pages. So, my questions:
-
Do you think there is any SEO value in the desktop footer links?
-
Do you have any suggestions about how best to include these 60-odd links in a way that works for mobile?
Thanks!
-
-
Hi, the first thing I would note is that a responsive design means you have the exact same content on the desktop and mobile versions - if you're considering serving different HTML to different users on the same URL this would be considered dynamic serving and you'll want to make sure you add the Vary-HTTP user agent header.
To answer your other questions:
1) Do you think there is any SEO value in the desktop footer links?
There is certainly some value, although how much is debatable - that would depend on how many total pages there are on the site, how much other content you have, and whether these pages are linked to elsewhere etc. You could test it by removing a handful of the links temporarily and see whether those pages see any sort of negative impact over 3-4 weeks. If you do this, make sure you do link to those pages from somewhere else on the site so they don't become orphaned.
2) Do you have any suggestions about how best to include these 60-odd links in a way that works for mobile?
I would suggest either leaving them in the footer in a collapsible div to help keep a clean look (maybe with your 5 or so most important links visible and a 'see more' option), or moving them to a hamburger menu on a mobile view.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Link Juice
Do you guys think having a guest post close to the root domain has more link juice that being in subfolders? example.com/123 vs example.com/nov/123 Both pages have the same amount of internal links and both pages don't have external links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arango201 -
Does link position matter in the content/html code
My question is that if I have several links going to different landing pages will the one at the top of the content pass more value than ones at the bottom. Assuming that there are not more than 1 of the same link in the content. The ultimate question is whether or not link position in the content/html code make a difference if it passes more value. This question comes in response to this whiteboard Friday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAH762AqUTU Rand talks about how if there are 2 links going to the same URL from the same content page then google will only inherit the value of the anchor text from the first link on the page and not the both of them. Meaning that google will treat that second link as if it doesn’t exist. There are lots of resources that shows this was true but there isn’t much content newer than 2010 that say this is still true, We all know that things have changed a lot since then Does that make sense?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 97th_Floor0 -
Slideshare - Links within
Hi Guys I am going to be putting some powerpoint presentations up over time. I have a couple of questions regarding slideshare. If I add links to the slideshare are these crawl able by Google etc...? If I places the powepoint presentation on our website and slideshare would this be counter productive i.e duplicate content? Love to here your suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Duplicate Content / Canonical Conundrum on E-Commerce Website
Hi all, I’m looking for some expert advice on use of canonicals to resolve duplicate content for an e-Commerce site. I’ve used a generic example to explain the problem (I do not really run a candy shop). SCENARIO I run a candy shop website that sells candy dispensers and the candy that goes in them. I sell about 5,000 different models of candy dispensers and 10,000 different types of candy. Much of the candy fits in more than one candy dispenser, and some candy dispensers fit exactly the same types of candy as others. To make things easy for customers who need to fill up their candy dispensers, I provide a “candy finder” tool on my website which takes them through three steps: 1. Pick your candy dispenser brand (e.g. Haribo) 2. Pick your candy dispenser type (e.g. soft candy or hard candy) 3. Pick your candy dispenser model (e.g. S4000-A) RESULT: The customer is then presented with a list of candy products that they can buy. on a URL like this: Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-A All of these steps are presented as HTML pages with followable/indexable links. PROBLEM: There is a duplicate content issue with the results pages. This is because a lot of the candy dispensers fit exactly the same candy (e.g. S4000-A, S4000-B and S4000-C). This means that the content on these pages are the basically same because the same candy products are listed. I’ll call these the “duplicate dispensers” E.g. Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-A Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-B Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-C The page titles/headings change based on the dispenser model, but that’s not enough for the pages to be deemed unique by Moz. I want to drive organic traffic searches for the dispenser model candy keywords, but with duplicate content like this I’m guessing this is holding me back from any of these dispenser pages ranking. SOLUTIONS 1. Write unique content for each of the duplicate dispenser pages: Manufacturers add or discontinue about 500 dispenser models each quarter and I don’t have the resources to keep on top of this content. I would also question the real value of this content to a user when it’s pretty obvious what the products on the page are. 2. Pick one duplicate dispenser to act as a rel=canonical and point all its duplicates at it. This doesn’t work as dispensers get discontinued so I run the risk of randomly losing my canonicals or them changing as models become unavailable. 3. Create a single page with all of the duplicate dispensers on, and canonical all of the individual duplicate pages to that page. e.g. Canonical: candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series Duplicates (which all point to canonical): candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=A candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=B candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=C PROPOSED SOLUTION Option 3. Anyone agree/disagree or have any other thoughts on how to solve this problem? Thanks for reading.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webmethod0 -
PR links
Its seems that at lot of or competitors are using PR site to place articles with links. They are using the same article across many sites with the same anchor text link - But they seem to be doing very well in the rankings.... I have steered away from this type of linking as I assumed Google wouldn't be keen on this type of activity but I seem to be wrong.... Any views on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
How to minimalise links in your footer
Hi guys, I'm working on the website to improve the internal linking structure. We have thousand of pages, and on every single page we have the same footer with the same links. For this reason I would like to change the footer in only relevant links for the user, but also for the robots. So for the user I leave in the general main links Home / Contact / Promotions and customise a part of the links to specific links about the section they are looking at. Now my idea was to add to the General Main links a Nofollow, so I direct the robots in a better structure about how to read the website. I have been reading a lot about internal linkbuilding- like http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday and http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link http://www.searchenginejournal.com/information-architecture-rocket-science-simplified/22503/ and a lot more, too much to display all. but my question would be, is it smart to internally start using NOFOLLOW's on links. because I do found also some negative comments on this approach http://www.dashboardjunkie.com/noindex-nofollow-canonical-and-disallow I hope to get some feedback from the community to make up my mind.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Letty0 -
Building a mobile site.
We are building a mobile site that will be launching in another month. I’m concerned that the mobile site will start catabolizing our traditional rankings. Is there a way to keep this from happening? Should we utilize the cross domain canonical tag and point back to the traditional site URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO-Team0 -
Footer sitewide links
Here's a question - does having a "website designed by" reference in the footer of every page of one of your clients help or hurt? I have a major university .edu that I designed a site for one of their departments and it is just about to launch and they've allowed me to put a reference in the footer. I've had pretty good luck with this on my other clients' sites, but didn't know if this practice is seen as spammy. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chas-2957210