Is my footer bad? i.e. hurting rankings

[astahl11]

Just curious what people think of my footer.  I think it provides some value.

Not that many people click on it but it doesn't look that bad in my opinion.

Curious what others think.  If getting rid of it would help SEO I'd look into it.  I outsource all my coding though so don't want to spend money tweaking what doesn't need to be done.

www.jobshadow.com

Thanks for the help!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

I really liked what Daniel said about using Crazy Egg to analyze user behavior, but you can also do something similar using Google Analytics.

Unfortunately, my suspicion is that very few of your users are clicking on those links. Google knows that footer links are rarely clicked, and scores of SEOs have abused this area in the past, and that's why Google tends to devalue any links placed there.

So even though in this case, the links there may provide some user benefit, Google most likely doesn't pass much link value through them, and may even devalue the anchor text text used, as these are site-wide footer links.

On the other hand, even those those links aren't helping you from an SEO perspective, they probably aren't hurting you very much either. You've chosen broad, partial-match anchor text, and the number of links seem within reason.

Food for thought: If the links are important to visitors, is the footer the best place for them? Perhaps if you found a more prominent location higher up in the navigation, you might see improved click-through rates, and you might even gain an SEO benefit from it.

Just something to think about.

[astahl11]

Thanks, and yes people don't always make it that far down.  I'm definitely going to add the terms of service and privacy policy on the bottom.  Good points.  Thanks again

[astahl11]

Thanks Andrew, good stuff.  Glad to know it's not of the spammy variety.  The last update almost made it sound like any footer was a bad footer.  Working on internal links now.

[mytouchoftech]

I think you may be thinking of the updates that says links in footers are bad now?  Correct me if I'm wrong.  I believe the intent of that is that site wide links in footers of other peoples sites that link to yours are devalued.  This means that you won't be getting link juice from every page on their website like you would expect.

Links in your own footer should be for the benefit of your visitors first, and I think that's what you've done with your links.  If you're trying to mold your PageRank in a specific way, try breadcrumbs or internal linking from the content of the page.

[dhidalgo1]

I don't see a problem with your Footer - I like it.

I do have, on the other hand a theory, as of why people might not be clicking on it (They don't scroll down enough). But a theory is a theory, so have you tried any Heat Map tool to analyze this - CrazyEgg for example?

On another note... you might consider (This is something I am doing with my own site, or at least I will this week ) to add some no-follow attributes to those links... which ones? The ones that you would in fact consider adding them to (if you think twice about it maybe you should add the attribute to it).

Also you might want to think about having a 'Privacy Policy' and/or 'Term of Use' links there... Those are good signals that you are a legitimate website... not to mention Ad Center will not let you (or at least that's what their policies state) advertise with them if these are not present and/or accessible from your Home Page.

Just my thoughts....

Daniel