Best practice for footer in ecommerce - Shall I add Top Category links?
-
What would you recommend regarding links to "Top Products" and "Top Categories" in footer?
- Would you add them to give extra link juice to top categories?
- would you try to avoid category links in footer that are already in the header navigationor in the main content area to avoid linking twice from all pages?
- would you vary these top category links in footer according to main category
-
thanks for the feedback. Will stick to few dynamic footer category links and test it.
-
Takeshi gave some great advise, and I agree.
I do like the idea of varying the footer navigation by category though. For example, you might interlink Men's Shoes with Women's Shoes, but you wouldn't want to link to Women's Shoes from Men's Shirts. Keeping the footer from being site-wide and making the links more relevant to the page their on will, I think, allow those footer links to carry more weight than they would otherwise.
Whatever you choose, make sure it's best for your users. Do that and it's difficult to go wrong.
-
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of mega menus or mega footers. Every link on a page dilutes the value of every other link on the page, so keep the number of links per page as low as possible, while optimizing for usability.
-
I agree with Takeshi. You should put more emphasis on what users want.
However based on my experience, if you limit the URLs to say 4-5 you would see some benefits. However if you plan to put much more, I wouldn't so much advice it.
K
-
Links in the footer carry very little link value, so I wouldn't add top category links to the footer just for SEO purposes. Looks at it more from a design/user experience perspective. If having the links in the footer makes navigation easier, then go for it.
As with anything else, the best thing to do is to test it. Install a click tracker such a CrazyEgg or ClickTale and see how people actually navigate the site. Test having the links in the footer vs removing them, and see if it affects usability, conversions rates, or SEO performance. Then keep the links that work the best.
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
-
Cornerstone Page And Outbound Links
I have a cornerstone page and 10 related articles that all have links to the cornerstone page. My question is, should the cornerstone page link back to those 10 articles as well or will it lose juice by doing so? Thanks in advance 😉
On-Page Optimization | | Humanovation0 -
How to add an affiliate store
Hi all Just wondering what other Mozewrs' would do about this..... I want to add a revenue stream to a blog of mine and I have decided that an affiliate store is the way to go. I can create a store with merchant datafeeds and pull in products related to my site, and all being well make some pennies from it. Obviously all the datafeeds are published on many other sites and so it will be very duplicate content. Would blocking Googlebot from the store be enough to ensure that the site doesn't receive a penalty for duplicate content? I would be keen on getting the product category pages indexed but not too worried about the actual products themselves. I would like to make some revenue from the site but not at the risk of killing the blog. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Locating broken links on site?
Hey guys, I'm using Screaming Frog to help locate some broken links on a client's site and I've managed to pick up two. However, I can't seem to find whereabouts they're located on the site in order to fix them! Is there a way I can do this? Cheers!
On-Page Optimization | | Webrevolve0 -
How To Change Wordpress Category Title
My categories are indexed and I want to change the category page title. At present it just defaults to the category name but I want to set a different page title. For example I want the category to be 'Motor Cars' but I want the category page title to be 'Buy Motor Cars - New And Used'. How can I do this?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Are there to many internal links here?
This is our main Motorcycle Parts page. In my opinion there are to many links on this page. They have put links to all the top brands after products. Do you think having all these links could be hurting our rankings/ ability for google to crawl the site efficiently? The links are good for navigation, I just think there are way to many there like over 200. Here is the page you can see what i am talking about http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/s/49/61/Motorcycle-Parts
On-Page Optimization | | DoRM0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
If a page has more than 100 links, rather than splitting up the page into multiple pages, is it ok to use name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />? The page in question lists links to articles so the page itself isn't that important to appear in serps, but the articles are the helpful content pages: www.ides.com/articles/processing/injection-molding/
On-Page Optimization | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
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) Screen_shot_2011-08-05_at_3.54.53_PM.png
On-Page Optimization | | aran0881