What is this exactly? Whiteboard Friday warning about footer links.
-
Hi guys.
I've just been watching this whiteboard Friday. At 2.01 mins Rand mentions something about a penalty that Google gives for certain internal linking practices. I'm a little confused about it.
Something along the lines of... 'stuffing keyword rich anchor text in the footer and nav bar'
Does Rand mean repeating keyword rich anchor text in these areas?
Or just that it's stuffing by nature... because it's on every page of the site?
Hope that makes sense.
I've attached a screen shot of our footer. Could you let me know if this is bad form?
Thanks in advance
-
Understood, and thanks! Really appreciate your time Rand!
-
If they're keyword rich and manipulative in nature, then yes, they could get you penalized. If they're more "accidentally" keyword rich because that's what the pages are called, you're probably fine. For example, if Moz happened to have a page called "SEO Tools" and it was linked to in the footer of our site, no big deal. If, however, we had "SEO Tools" | "SEO Software" | "Check SEO Rankings" | "SEO Guide" | etc. that would be more likely to get us in trouble.
-
Hi Rand, thanks so much for getting back to me again.
I think we may be cross purposes here. Ha. Just to be clear I was just asking purely about internal links in the context of your WBF here. (2 mins specifically)
The basic question is: Can keyword anchor text in footer links (naturally) linking to other relevent pages on our site induce any kind of penalty? Due to the fact they are on every page does this look 'spammy' or intentionally manipulative?
(I feel I may have got the wrong end of the stick here tbh).
-
Header? It's pretty unusual to have or to get an external link in the header (most users assume, accurately, that headers are internal navigation).
If you're talking about internal links, no problem! Footers, headers, sidebar navs -- all are expected to have sitewide links. We're just talking about external links that can be perceived as link spam.
I also did a WB Friday video on this that should be going up in the next few weeks with more detail. Basic story in your case is, if the links are internal, and they're not spammy-anchor-text/intentionally manipulative/hidden from users/etc, you should be just fine.
-
Thank you Rand! Just a quick follow up if I may?
So should we worry about this in our header section also?
We know from Hotjar that our users find the header Nav useful to really fine tune their search for our products... Week view diaries, day per page diaries, 30, 20, 15 mins appointment diaries etc.
Seems like a crazy penalty (even if they have revoked it now). I mean we just added this for UX Blagged.
-
Yep! The sitewide link penalty, also commonly known as the footer link penalty or the "web design by" penalty is a pretty common (though not 100% universal) link dampener. Google mostly just ignores those links now, but they sometimes used to actively penalize for their presence (and may still in certain cases). My best advice is to instead link from your about page or another well-linked-to page on your site vs. linking from every page.
-
Great question, maybe a Mozzer will jump on for more clarification, but I believe Rand was referencing doing the "repeating footer links", as in having many footer links with exact anchor text or anything similar. A "sitewide link" that is simply just one link at the footer, often used by web development or design companies, will not get you a Google penalty. With that being sad, footer links, especially, sitewide ones, do not carry much value for increasing rankings. They can be good for referral traffic though. Hope this helps and best of success!
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
-
Disavow Links & Paid Link Removal (discussion)
Hey everyone, We've been talking about this issue a bit over the last week in our office, I wanted to extend the idea out to the Moz community and see if anyone has some additional perspective on the issue. Let me break-down the scenario: We're in the process of cleaning-up the link profile for a new client, which contains many low quality SEO-directory links placed by a previous vendor. Recently, we made a connection to a webmaster who controls a huge directory network. This person found 100+ links to our client's site on their network and wants $5/link to have them removed. Client was not hit with a manual penalty, this clean-up could be considered proactive, but an algorithmic 'penalty' is suspected based on historical keyword rankings. **The Issue: **We can pay this ninja $800+ to have him/her remove the links from his directory network, and hope it does the trick. When talking about scaling this tactic, we run into some ridiculously high numbers when you talk about providing this service to multiple clients. **The Silver Lining: **Disavow Links file. I'm curious what the effectiveness of creating this around the 100+ directory links could be, especially since the client hasn't been slapped with a manual penalty. The Debate: Is putting a disavow file together a better alternative to paying for crappy links to be removed? Are we actually solving the bad link problem by disavowing or just patching it? Would choosing not to pay ridiculous fees and submitting a disavow file for these links be considered a "good faith effort" in Google's eyes (especially considering there has been no manual penalty assessed)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Etna0 -
How to build authority links and how they look ?
Hi how to build authority links and how they look ? If you could give a few examples so that i can see how it looks. and i have 9 linking root domains which is really low. so what are linking root domains ? and what i need to about that ? Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ivek991 -
Links from non-indexed pages
Whilst looking for link opportunities, I have noticed that the website has a few profiles from suppliers or accredited organisations. However, a search form is required to access these pages and when I type cache:"webpage.com" the page is showing up as non-indexed. These are good websites, not spammy directory sites, but is it worth trying to get Google to index the pages? If so, what is the best method to use?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maxweb0 -
Are links safe from friendsite.com?
I have just checked my backlinks in Majestic and was shocked. It appears I've gained 1500 back links in 1 day all from the domains friendsite.com. I checked a few of the links and the links to my site have disappeared. Looking at friendsite.com, it seems that peopel can bookmark a site, and when they do it appears on the "latest bookmerk" section which is site wide. So my concern is that: 1500 links have appeared in one day from one domain 1500 links disappeared the next day Wouldnt both of these cause Google to get suspicious? What should I do? Should I ask friendsite.com to remove the links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters1 -
Should I remove paid links?
I recently added about 20 paid links from directories but have since seen a 10% drop in traffic. I did also delete about 1000 pages of content that had no inbound links and were duplicated on other sites on the web and replaced the content with new content supplied by a client but still duplicated on other sites on the web, old URLs no longer valid or linked to, new content on new URLs. Assuming the drop in traffic had nothing to do with the content change mentioned above, should I remove the paid links in an attempt to recover? I don't think the old content was bringing in much traffic as it appeared elsewhere on more authoritive sites than mine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith0 -
Links on Google Notebook
I have used OSE to look at links of a competitors site and notice they have dozens for links from Google Notebook pages eg http://www.google.pl/notebook/public/05275990022886032509/BDQExDQoQs8r3ls4j This page has a PA of 48 Is this a legitimate linking strategy?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
Too many links!
Hi, I'm running a wordpress blog (modhop.com) and am getting the "too many links" on almost all of my pages. It appears that in addition to basic site navigation I have plug-ins that create invisible links that are counted in the crawl...at least that's my guess. Is there a good way to control this in wordpress? A nofollow in the .htaccess? A plug-in that does this? (I'm sort of at novice-plus level here so the simplest solution is ideal.) Thanks! Jake modhop.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | modhop0 -
Linking to Authorities
Hello, I know that if its good for the user, its not a bad move. But for this question I am specifically asking for how it affects my ranking. Does it help my ranking to link to appropriate authority sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser
Have you done any tests to see if linking out to authoritative sites like .gov info pages, industry leaders, etc. help with a sites ranking. I am thinking about taking of all of these outgoing links and just link to my important pages. Thank you, Tyler0