Is my footer bad? i.e. hurting rankings
-
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.
Thanks for the help!
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
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
-
Evolution of rankings over the course of time
Hello, Has anyone got experience on how rankings behave to climb all the way to the top once your do a redirect and change the design and content of your page entirely ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Do 403 Forbidden errors from website pages hurt rankings?
Hi All, I noticed that our website has lot of 403 errors across different pages using the tool http://www.deadlinkchecker.com/. Do these errors hurt website rankings? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Website not ranking
Firstly, apologies for the long winded question. I'm 'newish' to SEO We have a website built on Magento , www.excelclothing.com We have been online for 5 years and had reasonable success. Having used a few SEO companies in the past we found ourselves under a 'partial manual penalty' early last year. By July we were out of penalty. We have been gradually working our way through getting rid of 'spammy' links. Currently the website ranks for a handful of non competitive keywords looking at the domain on SEM RUSH. This has dropped drastically over the last 2 years. Our organic traffic over the last 2-3 years has seen no 'falling off a cliff' and has maintained a similar pattern. I've been told so many lies by SEO companies trying to get into my wallet I'm not sure who to believe. We have started to add content onto all our Category pages to make more unique although most of our Meta Descriptions are a 'boiler plate' template. I'm wondering.... Am I still suffering from Penquin ? Am I trapped by Panda and if so how can I know that? Do I need more links removed? How can I start to rank for more keywords I have a competitor online with the same DA, PA and virtually same number of links but they rank for 3500 keywords in the top 20. Would welcome any feedback. Many Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wgilliland1 -
Checking Rankings Again & Again Can Drop Rankings
Is it possible that if i check my google rankings again & again it can drop ranking?Like checking where do my keywords rank every hours rank drop the rankings? Because this indirectly affects the CTR. Might be because of it? No one has faced such an weird thing before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
How are these sites ranking!?!
One of our clients is in the insurance industry and over the last 12 months we have seen an increasing number of low quality, newly registered, spammy sites achieving top 5 rankings for major keywords, which in turn is having an adverse effect on the rankings for our client. Does anyone have any idea how the following sites have managed to do this: http://www.multiquotetaxi.co.uk/ - 2nd for taxi insurance http://www.motortradefast.co.uk/ - 1st for motor trade insurance http://www.traders-insurance.com/ - 3rd for motor trade insurance http://www.multiquotefleet.co.uk/ - 1st for fleet insurance We have tried reporting the above sites, tried holding out to see if they get penalised and tried figuring out what they have done ourselves but cannot see how they have managed it. Any ideas at all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | instinctive0 -
Author rank
Can anyone tellme how to know my author rank. Is better to gain authority on my author rank +dariopropdental And if it is better to gain authority as author or as page +propdental And if a do a new post on my web every day should i place every link to the post on my profile and my page. Doenst it look spammy. Should all post have a link from my profile.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Why my blog ranks poorly on Google ?
Hi 🙂 I need help for my blog, my blog http://www.dota2club.com/ for many keywords it is not in first 50 results on google. What am i doing wrong ? Can you tell me what errors / mistakes i have made and what can i do to improve my blog ? Thank you !!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wolfinjo0 -
Ranking with other pages not index
The site ranks on page 4-5 with other page like privacy, about us, term pages. I encounter this problem allot in the last weeks; this usually occurs after the page sits 1-2 months on page 1 for the terms. I'm thinking of to much use the same anchor as a primary issue. The sites in questions are 1-5 pages microniche sites. Any suggestions is appreciated. Thank You
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | m3fan0