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
-
SPA (angularJS) Ranking Problem
Hello dear experts; I working on SPA website with More than 20,000 indexed pages by Google there is a problem that I involved with: 1- Some pages had a good ranking on google.com but from a week ago, ranks one by one, dropped and homepage Replaced. for example, URL: https://cafegardesh.com/tours-dubai removes and https://cafegardesh.com replaced. Google still see the page when I use Fetch as Google tool. I can't understand what happens Is there anyone can find my site problems?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cafegardesh0 -
I am lost at where to go. My optimization rating is 95% + and rankings are on pages 4+. I would like to know what I should do to increase my rankings.
My site is Glare-Guard.com. My Domain Authority has not moved from 17 in a long time. i have done everything to optimize the different pages. I have 90%+ ratings for the various pages, yet I am still not even close to the first page for many of the keywords I am looking to rank for. Do you have any tips or ideas? Should I try to rewrite my content and add more information? I am just at a loss for where I should go to get the right traffic to my site. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bigskyinc0 -
3 Pages Ranking Beside Each Other | How do I consolidate so one ranks better?
An ecommerce website I own called backyardGamez.com sells outdoor games, for example cornhole boards, bags, etc. One such product is a cornhole board carrying case. If you search the above phrase, my site has three pages that rank on the first page. The term isn't high volume, so I'm assuming that is part of the reason. Is this a good, normal thing or does this mean I have inadvertently broken up my ranking power from one powerful page to 3 OK pages? Does anyone know how I can take two of these pages and use them to make the 3rd page more powerful? For example, I would prefer 1 page ranks higher on page 1 in the serps and the other two fall a bit from supporting the other. Thanks, Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Soft-Lite0 -
Why Keyword is not ranking
I have blog website - http://uncutweb.com/ My website ranked for keywords - What Color Shoes To Wear With Gold Dress, Keywords is having Moz Difficulty Score: 35% with A grade moz On page Score. But why my website is not ranked for What Color Shoes To Wear With Purple Bridesmaid Dress or **What Color Shoes To Wear With Coral Dress???**They have less difficulty score and having A grade.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ross254sidney0 -
Yahoo rankings anomaly?
Two days ago I went from ranking outside the top 50 to ranking #1 and #4 for two great terms on Yahoo. Now two days later I don't rank in the top 50 again. I sure wish I knew what that blip on the radar was all about. It would be great to get ranked again. Seems like a mystery. I have not heard of this happening on Yahoo before. Maybe it was a problem with the open link explorer? Anyone see this happen before? Thank you, Boodreaux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Ranking
Hi All, I have been working on a car insurance site which targets US market. we have been doing all types of links to the site like - good related directory links, related blogpost and reviews. the site is updated daily with a fresh unique content. what more is needed to get it to the first page. we are currently ranking in the range of 40 - 50 on the page 4 or page 5. we have also recently done a redesign with a new cms, done a good press release but not seeing much of changes. please if anyone in the same industry or with some experience can suggest us. we are using all white hat seo & I can understand the amount of competition in this niche. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Markyseo0 -
How to increase rankings?
I know to increase rankings involves link building, but what kind of link building is worth it and what type is not? At the moment most of my link building effort is focused on guest blogging, which has worked well for me, I have seen some good movement on a range of keywords using this tactic but I cant help but think I could get a lot more movement in the serp's if I mixed it up a little. A few other link building techniques I know of are below, but I don't really use them, so my question is what ones should I be using combined with my guest blogging to give my rankings that little extra help. 1. Directory Submissions 2. Article Submissions 3. Press Release Distribution 4. Forum Signatures 5. Blog Comments 6. Social bookmarking 7. Social Sites (Squidoo, Weebly, Wordpress, blogger) If I have missed something please let me know. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Pages On Subfolder Not Ranking
A subdirectory/folder on our website doesn't seem to rank for any keywords where the same type of pages on the same competition level keywords rank perfectly fine. For awhile the pages weren't getting indexed but were crawled regularly. Can't seem to figure the problem out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bprimeelitellc0