Are menu links considered spammy?
-
Hi,
I'm wondering if having a footer menu with keyword links is considered spam? It makes sense to me to have your keywords and links to relevant pages on each page.
Thanks
-
Spam-A-Rama! hahah
Thanks Dana, makes perfect sense!
-
Hi Memoz, I think this completely depends on how it's done. Footers are a completely normal and expected part of Web design. For example, when you go to a new site you've never been to before, you almost expect to find "About Us" and "Contact Us" links in the footer. You also expect to find some redundant navigation, like "main products" or "clearance items."
Now, if you have a footer that does something like this:
Used Cars Seattle
Used Car West Seattle
Used Cars East Seattle
Used Cars Bellingham
Used cars northeast Seattle
Used Cars North Seattle
and so on....
Yes, I'd say Spam-A-Rama! Probably not a great idea.
Trust your instinct. If you stop at some point and think to yourself, "Self, this is looking mighty spammy," then, it's probably spammy and don't do it.
Can anyone say for sure what Google will see as spam and penalize and what it will leave alone? No. So I can't tell you what Google will or won't do and how Google will or won't view your content. I'm just sayin' trust your gut.
I hope that helps!
Dana
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
-
Linking back to the homepage im trying to rank - Using exact match anchor? Linking from footer?
Hello, Our site is an basically advertisements / listings website. Structure is as following <last 200="" adds=""> (homepage trying to rank) < category 1 > < category 1 > < category 1 > < category 1 > < category 1 ></last> My question - each of the categories links back within the menu back to homepage. The link text currently is last 200 adds. Can i use exact match anchor? Or should i use just last 200 ads? The issue is that one of my categorys (category 1) has already the exact match anchor im trying to rank for. So i can not use the same to link back to homepage. Im worried that google does not see any exact keyword anchor texts back to homepage hence will rank my homepage with lower strenght for that keyword . Im also worried that the category 1 page might now compete with the main homepage for this word (even tho at the moment category itself does not rank for this keyword) Can i link from footer back to homepage with an alternative keyword then to give some "context" to google more? Would this be spamming?
On-Page Optimization | | advertisingcloud0 -
Impact of multiple links on the same page to the same url (different anchor text) ?
Hi, On our category pages, for every product we have several links pointing to the product : on the image, on the product name, on the short description, on "read more", and a javascript onclick on the entire div. Could this have a negative impact for link juice distribution, or is it counted as only 1 link with the first anchor text found on the page ? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Strelok0 -
Duplicate links from forum what to do?
After a crawl it found over 5k errors and over 5k warnings. Those are: Duplicate page content; Duplicate page title; Overly-Dynamic URLs; Missing Meta descr; Title Element too long. All those come from domain.com/forum/ I don't need SEO on forum so what should I do? What could be an easy solution to this? No index? No follow? Please help
On-Page Optimization | | OVJ0 -
Need suggestion: Should the user profile link be disallowed in robots.txt
I maintain a myBB based forum here. The user profile links look something like this http://www.learnqtp.com/forums/User-Ankur Now in my GWT, I can see many 404 errors for user profile links. This is primarily because we have tight control over spam and auto-profiles generated by bots. Either our moderators or our spam control software delete such spammy member profiles on a periodic basis but by then Google indexes those profiles. I am wondering, would it be a good idea to disallow User profiles links using robots.txt? Something like Disallow: /forums/User-*
On-Page Optimization | | AnkurJ0 -
Too Many On-Page Links, Can You HELP???
This is the best architecture I found to help my visitors find there furnace filter size. Does it hurt my SEO? Index page has, 210 links and most other pages has, 190 links. Thank you, BigBlaze
On-Page Optimization | | BigBlaze2050 -
Internal Linking - in content vs navigation menu
Would like to get some thoughts on whether navigation menus or in-content links are best for internal linking, from an SEO standpoint. A few thoughts to get started with: For sites with a lot of content, you can have a navigation menu linking to your higher-level pages, then in-content links to deeper pages on your site. For smaller sites, this is not an option, as the navigation menu will probably link to all your important pages. You could add in-content links, but Google only counts the first link on the page, so the in-content links would be ignored if you'd already linked yp the page in your top nav menu. I can think of several possible reasons navigation menu links could be less desirable than in content links from a Google perspective. (They are sitewide boilerplate content without context.) If you setup your navigation structure based on what is best for the user, small sites don't have much wiggle room to optimize internal link structure, as all their money pages will be linked to from the top nav menu. Do you think Google prefers in content links to navigation menu links? If so, how do you get around the fact that for many sites, all their money pages are being linked to from their main navigation menu?
On-Page Optimization | | AdamThompson0 -
Do footer links apply too many on-page links?
We tend to put a a lot of links in the footers of some of our websites (e.g. www.AlohaWhistler.com). Our CAMPAIGNS report is showing that several pages on such sites have "too many on-page links". We understand the logic that having more than 100 links per page is "too much". Does this also apply to footer links?
On-Page Optimization | | RoyMcClean0 -
Prevent link juice to flow on low-value pages
Hello there! Most of the websites have links to low-value pages in their main navigation (header or footer)... thus, available through every other pages. I especially think about "Conditions of Use" or "Privacy Notice" pages, which have no value for SEO. What I would like, is to prevent link juice to flow into those pages... but still keep the links for visitors. What is the best way to achieve this? Put a rel="nofollow" attribute on those links? Put a "robots" meta tag containing "noindex,nofollow" on those pages? Put a "Disallow" for those pages in a "robots.txt" file? Use efficient Javascript links? (that crawlers won't be able to follow)
On-Page Optimization | | jonigunneweg0