It has been recommended that we remove the number of links in our footer, should we?
-
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)
-
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.
-
@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...
-
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.
-
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.
-
Thanks Egol! I have looked at CrazyEgg in the past, and I will revisit them now.
-
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?
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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)
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
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
-
Proper URL Structure. Feedback on Vendors Recommendation
Urgent! We're doing a site redesign and our vendor recommended new url structure as follows: website.com/folder/word1word2word3. Our current structure is website.com/word1-word2 They said that from SEO perspective, it doesn't make a difference if there are dashes between words or not and Google can read either URL. Is that true? I need experts to weigh on the above, as well as SEO implications if we were to implement their suggestion.
On-Page Optimization | | bluejay78780 -
Cross-linking for mobile SEO
Hi everyone! I am having a hard time finding information about weather to/how to apply internal seo linking to mobile versions of sites. We decided to go with dynamic serving with user agent detection. Our desktop site has a quite heavy seo-internal-cross-linking. As I understand, for mobile we should simplify and focus on usability, so get rid of unnecessary links. But I have a doubt about weather removing this part of the web structure can hurt our SEO. Do Google mobile bots look at and rank mobile versions of pages from scratch or do they use what they know about the site and the site's structure from its desktop version?
On-Page Optimization | | ofertia0 -
Bad to have "As Seen on" links sitewide
I've seen a lot of people saying that sidewide external links are a no-go. Does this also apply to links of a vanity variety? What I mean by this is "as seen on" links or links to awards given to the business? This intellectually seems okay to me, but I want to make sure I'm not shooting myself in the foot. Any evidence, case studies, anecdotal stories would be appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | Oren.0 -
Number of pages crawled in dropping from 4 to 2
The report on our campaign shows that up to 2 pages are being crawled now from 4. However, our site has more pages than this. We recently inserted code to allow crawlers. what can we do to resolve this? please assist.v
On-Page Optimization | | seoworx1230 -
Impact of nofollow links
Does anyone know what the impact of a nofollowed link is on the ranking value any given page has to distribute? For example, if I have 2 links on a page, both followed, I know those links each distribute nearly 50% of the total ranking value the current page has to offer. However, if one of those links is nofollowed, does that automatically mean the other link gets the ranking value cast off by the nofollowed link? In other words, the single followed link now distributes nearly 100% of the ranking value the page has to offer? It seems to me I remember hearing this was not the case and that the ranking value a nofollowed link would have if it were followed just evaporates. This would mean the single followed link still only passes on around 50%...not 100%. Is the effect different if the links are internal vs. external? If any citations are available to justify knowledge here, that would be great. I know a lot of people have opinions about this subject, but I'm not sure anyone knows Google's position. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | RyanOD0 -
More than 100 internal links from a page
Hi, we have been developing our new site and improving the internal linking for 2 reasons, 1 to improve spidering and 2 to up sell more to customers. The error reports from SEOMoz are showing our biggest problem is too many internal links from 2000+ pages. How much of an impact does it have by having say 180 internal links compared to say 99 on a page? Our website has been moving up the SERPs so should i worry about it or should I ignore the warnings and continue with the menu system and internal linking we have in place already? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | PottyScotty0 -
To many links on a single page Error
I've seen it a few times where you should have less then 100 links per page to help crawling unless your a massively authoritative website. But what happens when your a large ecommerce website with categories and sub categories, you could have a category called 'computers' with a drop down list containing lots of sub cat links. Whats the solution to this? Cheers
On-Page Optimization | | activitysuper1 -
Do external links drain PageRank?
Example: A page has 100 links, 90 internal links and 10 external links. The page has a Google internal PR of 1000. The question is: Is the pagerank that flows to the internal links being calculated taking into account all links on the page (internal + external) or only the 90 internal links? E.g. is the PR that flows to the internal links 1000/100 or 1000/90? Are links to external sites "votes" that do not affect the internal PR flow? Disclaimer: I understand that the maths behind the PR algo are more complex. This simplified example only serves to explain my question.
On-Page Optimization | | Florakel0