It has been recommended that we remove the number of links in our footer, should we?

[aran088]

We have a pretty user friendly footer with almost an entire site-map on it. It's similar to many e-commerce company footers, and I think it's useful to the user.

SEO professionals have recommended that to reduce the number of links on any given page on our site we should compress our footer and only show the headers, thus removing many links.

This in my opinion is a disservice to the user and makes the site not look as good, but maybe it's a good idea for SEO to get rid of so many links per page?

What do you think?

(pic attached)

Screen_shot_2011-08-05_at_3.54.53_PM.png

[GYMSN]

This was just mentioned in Rand's white board video, tip #3.  The only thing is it conflicts with SEOmoz's linking, as they have about 20 links on the footer.  Are they there because they are getting clicked on?

I'm pretty sure nobody clicks on my footer links and am in the process of removing them and adding customized side navigations on specific pages to add a better navigational structure.

To SEOmoz, why so many footer links on SEOmoz if it's a 2012 no, no?

Note:  Must be logged out to see footer links.

[zeepartner]

@Aran: Did you find out if people actually clicked on those footer links? From the screenshot, the links don't look too bad and it's possible to keep an overview. So it would be interesting to know if people don't even click on a well-done footer...

[crvw]

I definitely agree that you should figure out if your footer links are adding value to your users.  If they are, I'm not sure I'd blindly follow the "prune your links" philosophy.  I note that Zappos.com seems to rank OK with a pretty link heavy footer.  One size does not fit all.

[ericpratum]

There are a number of different ways in GA, Omniture, etc to track specific link clicks from places like the footer...many of which I'm not extremely well versed in, but the googles certainly know. I would definitely recommend doing that to get a pure numbers look at the situation.

I'd also though recommend you modify Will Critchlow's mturk method of grading content for a look at usability of the footer and/or use something like usertesting.com to get some qualitative feedback on the footer. Guaranteed you will get a look at your design that you've never even thought of, and the cost is so extremely low when you consider what you can get out of it.

replicate-googles-panda-questionnaire-whiteboard-friday

[aran088]

Thanks Egol! I have looked at CrazyEgg in the past, and I will revisit them now.

[aran088]

Thanks Ryan - My challenge is getting actionable data on how useful the footer links are to users. How would you recommend using Google Analytics to accomplish this?

[aran088]

You are probably right, but by removing the subcategories for the other sections of the site (Guides, Blog) maybe lateral movement throughout the site will be reduced... is that reduced browsing worth the SEO benefit by the number of links removed?

[aran088]

Thanks Albin!

How would you get the most useful data on the footer links with Google Analytics? I use site overlay and it's not very accurate because site overlay just reports on the percent of people who click on a link on the page, regardless of location. I am not 100% certain as to how to get actionable data on the effectiveness of the footer.

It's a pretty labour intensive project redesigning and re-implementing a new footer so I want to make sure it's really worth it.

[EGOL]

You are operating under the assumption that people are using those footer links.

Run a program like CrazyEgg to see if anyone is clicking those links.

I bet nobody clicks them.

[mozalbin]

Ryan, your absolutely right about the .xml-sitemap. The important is of course that the sitemap is reported to the search engines and therefore it's not mandatory to place it in the footer. (Should have thought of that...sorry)

[RyanKent]

I strongly agree with Albin and Joe. Check to see what your user's think. I'll take the user experience over a group of SEO experts. What do SEO's know?

Your footer links are very well presented and represent your site well. It is a best practice to minimize your links. If you discovered your links are not actually being used then the feedback from your users is basically those unused links are not helpful and you can consider removing them OR possibly altering the anchor text to something that users may find more helpful.

I will disagree with Albin about the sitemaps. I usually recommend an HTML sitemap but I would not recommend placing a link to a XML sitemap on your page. Offering two sitemaps to users does not make sense to me, and a HTML sitemap is clearly the more useful way to present a sitemap. In your case, I probably wouldn't offer a HTML sitemap either. You mentioned that you already offer links to almost all of the pages on your site. If the couple pages you do not offer links to are not very popular and you have other links to those pages, you may be better of as-is.

I have the impression many SEOs blindly follow certain "rules" such as eliminate footer links and always go xyz. It's important to view standards as guidelines which need to be flexible and adjusted for each site's needs.

[JoeAmadon]

Pruning links from page templates (header, footer, etc.) is generally a good idea if they don't go to important pages. As Albin suggests, listen to the data. What are users not clicking on?

I can see some of these as not being needed in the footer. If your store pages are used as navigation, these are redundant, unless users like using them in the footer. Pages like "returns" and "order tracking" probably aren't making you a lot of money, and can still be easily found from a customer service page that is linked to from the footer. This way users can still find what they need, but you only devote one link instead of four or five.

I don't think removing a handful of links from the footer will diminish the look of the site or the user experience significantly.

[mozalbin]

What does the statistics says about clicks on the links in the footer? Does users actually find the footer useful?

If there are some links in the footers that might be popular to the users, then keep them and erase the others. If you have 100+ links on your page, that's really bad. Keep the amount of links to a minimum and try to "listen" to the users by only having useful links in the footer. If you're using e.g. Analytics, it might be easy to check these stats.

Report these stats for me and I'll give you a quick analysis about which links to keep and which to get rid of.

Another follow-up question; Does your page has a link to a xml-sitemap AND a html-sitemap? If not, get it for best optimization