Are we talking about navigational urls in footers? The kind say a CMS will naturally place there?

Or is this about external sites, which I completely understand, I don't understand how navigational menus in the footer, say of the most popular pages on the site could be considered manipulation or a scheme.

I understand the original poster ( Gary ) is speaking of his site's url on domains he designs in the footer, but now this talk has me wondering the wording of google.

Thanks for the further clarification.

I'd have to 3rd the wordpress suggestion, if you had a big site with lots of pages and a involved user portal then Drupal would be the goto suggestion. But if it's a smaller site, no need to deal with the issues of a huge site if you don't need to.

Joomla isn't bad, and can be managed but unless you're a webdev you'll want access to info and scripts and by far the most popular choice is wordpress.

Just make sure you do a thorough product audit so you can reduce the overall amount of product before you put them online, this will help SEO drastically, since you'll have less pages that users would draw attention to that don't work too well.

Thanks for that,

Yes I've been under the impression that any external link in a footer is going to be looked at questionably by google, especially if it's promotional in nature. Since it can indicate a paid link.

I've watched a few competitors using that same tactic to increase their overall DA for freshsite starting, they 1st ranked great and quickly dropped for various keywords relating to that link placed.

Thanks again EGOL & Gary

Also just remember even hunters get lost in the forest, knowledge is a quest not an end result.

Question everything

I can also add that Google might also just insert it's own title tag for your page, and completely disregard you title tag you want. Why? Because they feel they know better, in my experience, they don't, it makes no sense to me at all why Google would basically slap your hand and say " No, bad, this is what we're using ". When it's your site to begin with.

But it is Google and at the end of the day, it's their search engine = their rules.

So all that can be said is, make sure your title tag is within character limits, and relevant, index it and wait. It's kinda like rich snippets and search bars for brand name searches, they choose when those show up as well, it's really odd how SEOs, SEMs and so forth squeeze themselves through Google's molds, yet Google just let's themselves hang everywhere without care.

But them be the breaks!

Just understand this  ( Google > Us )

Hello,

Got to remember that if you create a page for each keyword variation, that those pages are going to have horrible metrics and could even hurt ranking for that keyword because of such.

I have really seen great results when you focus all intent on the user, is making a bunch of pages that barely have content but target that keyword going to really help users?

It would be better off to try and target one page for many variations, especially if that page is going to answer the user's search query. That's really how you should be setting your pages up, the keyword they rank for should be keywords that contain info being searched for otherwise you're going to have bad traffic that could send bad signals.

You'd be better off writing blogs for those keyword variations and tying content and other pages ( like the parent keyword page ) into them with links to help add authority.

Brand terms are mainly for homepage, about us page and possibly landing page of a category parent. Otherwise using your brand ( unless in a blog post ) is kinda stuffing things and wasting space that could be used by other keywords.