Worthwhile to have global footer links?
-
About Us, FAQ, Site Map, Terms & Privacy - I know rarely viewed by users (at least on my website), so why keep in global footer across all pages, since one could argue it will dilute some link juice to more important pages?Why not just keep on homepage only? What is argument for having links to these pages across all pages on a site? Is there any SEO value?
-
Thanks for the great answers! This is very helpful for me.
-
good answer, Cyrus. I think the trust factor is probably more relevant than that 1% of users that may click. Other users will scroll and see those about, faq etc links and that ads trust and I think that is key why it makes sense to keep.
-
Hi Kristian,
Generally, we advise to keep links in useful places that add value for visitors, but prune links that are added solely for search engine manipulation.
Links like "About Us" and "privacy" can add a huge amount of trust to a website. Even if only 1% of your customers click there, it's a huge value add for those customers, in my opinion.
Yes, there is an issue of pagerank dilution, but unless you have dozens of links in this area it's usually a minimal concern. Search engines use so many other ranking factors, it's not a big deal.
That said, it's sometimes useful to combine links - both for ease of navigation and link consolidation. Like "Terms & Privacy" and "About Us" - which leads to a seperate pages about Team > Services > etc.
-
If your users are looking for that information in the footer those links should be there. To remove them in case it provides some ephemeral SEO benefit is looking at your website the wrong way around.
Billions of pages have those same links in those same spots. This includes some of the best, and best-ranking pages on the internet. I wouldn't worry.
If you are really concerned for some reason - here's an idea. Have a single link to covering all those topics going to a page called 'legal' or something. Link that page to the pages you used to have in the footer, but also to key pages in the site.
Mathematically that greatly reduces the problem of leaking pagerank. However I suspect that there are far far better uses of resources.
-
If its organized and really simple like the footer here in SEOMoz (check below), then keep it. If its just 5-6 footer links, I dont think it would take up a lot of link juice.
Plus footer links, (not considering SEO and Google) are indeed useful for site navigation purposes.
-
My footer links are well-organized, but few and they are About, FAQ, Sitemap, Terms & Privacy, which in theory are good for users to have access to throughout my site. However, if I know less than 5% of users click on those, that means very little user value. Will it help me from an SEO perspective to keep those footer links throughout my site or is the answer a clear "no" and I should only keep if the users benefit from having those links. Again, especially on my deeper pages with low PA, I am concerned about spreading the link juice on an already weak page....
-
Hi Kristian,
Global footer links are not anymore recommended to have on websites as they used to.
Aside from what you mentioned about link juice being passed on away from the more important pages, footer links are, most of the time, devalued by search engines and they also get low CTR.
Still, a lot of sites are still using them as resource for link placement.
So I guess it still depends if you have a really nice organization and layout as a footer (like this: http://shopper.cnet.com) then keep it. If not, it might just be a waste of your time.
Cheers!
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
-
How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?
We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.0 -
Is a scholarship seen as buying links?
We work in the student loan debt industry, so providing a scholarship for our viewers makes total sense for our business. Would links to this page be seen by Google as buying links? Does this fall anywhere into gray-hat tactics? My gut tells me no because helping people with student debt is what we do. The scholarship really synergizes with our business model, but who knows..?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DemiGR0 -
By giving link do we lose our PageRank?
Hi moz fans,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atakala
I'm asking this question because I've faced this (http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank)
Till now I know that when we link to a page we **don't **lose our PageRank, we just give a PageRank but not to lose it .
I mean let's say If we have a page PR 1, and another page B which is pagerank 0,
And If we give link a to page B from page A, At the end of the iteration, we have Page A PR 1 and Page B PR 0,85.
**But **he said above the link If we give a link to a page, it would result like this.
Page A PR 0,15 and Page B PR 0,85. Which one is true ?
Thank you!0 -
Penguin Footer Links - Penalty or Devaluation?
One of customers provides IT Support for a municipality. The municipality's website (1000+ pages) has a footer link with the anchor text "IT Support" linking to our customer's site. The link is there for employees to get help. In mid summer, our customer's rankings tanked for "IT Support". It looks like a hit by Penguin. The question is, could removing the links bring the rankings back? Does Google's penguin algorithm penalize you for the footer links, or are they simply de-valued? Should we pull them down or no-follow them? If they aren't truly hurting their rankings, we would just leave them
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill1 -
Why my good links disappeared from gWMT?
Hi Last night some of my good links suddenly stopped from being display displayed at the WMT list of links Any thoghts? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Internal linking between categories
Is it necessary to do internal links between the same categories of a website ( Let's say Ihave a category about shoes and in the category I have a page about boots and one about sandals ( should the page boots be accessible from the page sandals and the other way round or is the back button going back to the section shoes enough ) ? If internal links between the same category ( sandals to boots ) are needed/recommended is it also a good practice to do site wide links between categories ( shoes and and bags for example ) Because by reading google recommendations "Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link" I am not sure if they are talking about breadcrumbs or text links i am kind of lost ... Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Are Links from Homepage safe?
I have the option of getting a link from 2 websites home pages. My site is a financial service website. I want to know if it is safe to do so. The first site is a hotel site, so their content has no relation to my site And the second is a Google News website about finances They have offered me a section in the sidebar to have a sentence or 2 about my site with a link. Can you tell me would these be safe to get? I don't want to be hit by any penalty
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Best tools for exploring links?
and not just every single link, but ones you know that Google is actually indexing. I find seomoz to be super easy, but there is no way to distinguish links that are actually counting "juice", or am i missing something. What about majesticseo - any other similar tools you use when trying to find linking sites that pass juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900