Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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.

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

"raised beds"

eartheasy.com/grow_raised_beds.htm

The one thing that contradicts with this is that SEOmoz report cards keep stating that our anchor text on links is considered cannibalization. How do we "modify our anchor text" without using "raised beds" or "raised garden beds" and risk this issue of cannibaliation?

"buy a raised bed", "raised garden beds", "Composite Timber Raised Beds", "Cedar Raised Beds", "Farmstead Raised Beds", "Cedar rectangular raised beds", "raised beds and supplies", and "Complete Raised Garden Bed Kits"

Explanation

It's a best practice in SEO to target each keyword with a single page on your site (sometimes two if you've already achieved high rankings and are seeking a second, indented listing). To prevent engines from potentially seeing a signal that this page is not the intended ranking target and creating additional competition for your page, we suggest staying away from linking internally to another page with the target keyword(s) as the exact anchor text. Note that using modified versions is just fine (for example, if this page targeted the word 'elephants', using 'baby elephants' in anchor text would be just fine).

Recommendation

Unless there is intent to rank multiple pages for the target keyword, it may be wise to modify the anchor text of this link so it is not an exact match

Thanks for these observations! This page as well as many on the site are legacy pages from 10 years ago which do not adhere to modern best practices, and the bold characters and header mis-use are great examples.

Great points.

We used to rank #1 on Google for "Raised Garden Beds" forever, until just a few days ago and now we are last on page 2. If you look at everyone who outranks us they are a bit more specific with page title.

Why would reducing the amount of information in the page title help us, when the top dogs seem to be doing otherwise?

We have a content page with the explicit goal of ranking highly for "raised garden beds". We drive traffic from this page to our various types of raised garden beds in our store. The "FarmsteadRaised Garden Bed" is one such product.

http://eartheasy.com/grow_raised_beds.htm

Should we avoid using "raised garden beds" in the anchor text of the internal links pointing to the products in our store because of cannibalization?

We recently changed the anchor text of the internal links to have keywords instead of just "click here" or "more info" - was this a good idea?

What should our optimal anchor text look like?

Thanks - reading up on rel=author now. Looks kinda complicated from the Google instructions..

Great advice  - I especially like the suspicious inbound links idea.. never thought of that.

We have had experts say that we have too many links per page on average on our site, and that we should consolidate the links in the sitewide footer as they add so many links per page.

Is this a good idea? Are we being hurt by having so many outbound links and such a link heavy footer?

Thanks

So at the footer of any article we publish by another author have a link to that author's original article with rel="author" in it?

That page has been around for 10 years on our site, and as you can see, many many people are ripping it off, along with all other pages on our site.

Would you recommend an aggressive campaign of "cease and desist" emails to these plagiarizers, coupled with more addition of unique content??

All of our top ranked articles are unique, although many people rip them off and it's hard as heck for us to track them all down and get them to remove our content.

I recently did this for our "Raised Garden Bed" Page, which contributes a huge amount of our traffic. It was very labour intensive.

Our blog has a lot of articles that other authors have written and are republished elsewhere.

The attached screenshot shows all.

Panda update hit us hard = we lost half our traffic.

Three months later, Panda tweak gave us traffic back.

Now, this past Tuesday we lost half our traffic again and ALL our top ranking Keywords/phrases on Google (all other search engines keywords holding rank fine).

Did they tweak their algorithm again? What are we doing wrong??

eartheasy.com

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