How to handle footer links after Penguin?
-
With the launch of Google's Penguin I know that footer links could possibly hurt rankings. Also too many links on a page are also bad. I have a client http://www.m-scribe.com That has footer links creating well over 100 links on many of their pages. How should I handle these footer links? Suggestions are greatly appreciated.
-
You should check this out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo
-
I would add rel="nofollow" to most or all of them, and/or add a site map link to the footer and place all of those links on a sitemap page.
The nofollow is best used for links that link to sites you don't want to give credibility to, and the site map should be for internal links.
-
I have not seen any incidences of a Penguin penalty where internal links played any part. Nothing in either of Google's link penalty notices make mention or inference of internal links playing any part
S
-
Back in the day footer links were generally being used "so robots could index the site better" and eventually many people were stuffing a ton of keyword down there.
Now, I believe, the best way of looking at it is what clicks are most useful to the visitor. Logically, I would include 5 or 10 links to pages with the most traffic and rotate quarterly so that they are "fresh".
-
If it makes sense to place a link place it. Sitewide links (footer links) should be links, which your users are most likely going to look for, by placing links in the footer you are making it easier for your user to contact you, or find what it is they came to your site for. Abusing sitewide links (footer links) is having all your keywords or all the cities you service written for the search engine.
Here is a resent whiteboard Friday that will explain in detail how to link a site where it makes sense: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday
-
Here's a good discussion on the issue of footer links:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-penguin-question-re-footer-links
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
-
Too many dofollow links = penalty?
Hi. I currently have 150 backlinks, 90% of them are dofollow, while only 10% are nofollow. I recently hit position #10 for my main keyword, but now it is dropped to #16 and a lot of related keywords are gone. So I have a few questions: 1. Was my website penalized for having an unnatural backlink profile (too many dofollow links), or maybe this drop in positions is just a temporary, natural thing? 2. Isn’t it too late for making the backlink profile look more natural by building more nofollow backlinks and making it 50%/50%? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NathalieBr0 -
Still Battling On With Link Profile Audit
I'm getting there, I can see the light! 🙂 I have covered one complete audit of the link profile and I am now going back over it looking at the links I had 'question marked' - I should have this completed by the end of this week and I will then focus on using DISAVOW for the links that I am really struggling with, the foreign sites that are in Chinese or Russian, the sites that have absolutely no 'contact us' information and have been privately registered (in WhoIs) I have come across this domain which links to our site about 8 times and although I cannot find any contact info I can't quite make my mind up, to be honest I would rather get rid of it BUT I'm trying to avoid taking the easy option of disavowing where I can; http://www.askives.com/ Fo anyone who has gone through what I am currently going through, please help me just this once and tell me 'should it stay or should it go'?! 🙂 Many thanks! Andy
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TomKing0 -
Linking my pages
Hello everybody, i have a small dilemma and i am not shore what to do. I am (my company) the owner of 10 e-commerce web sites. On every site i have a link too the other 9 sites and i am using an exact keyvoerd (not the shop name).Since the web stores are big and have over a 1000 pages, this means thet all my sites have a lot off inbound links (compared with my competiton). I am woried that linking them all together could be bad from Googles point of wiev. Can this couse a problem for me, should i shange it? Regardes, Marko
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Spletnafuzija0 -
Blackhat Winners after Penguin 2.0
I know I'm not the only one that's seen this. After Penguin 2.0 some obvious blackhat SEOed sites flew up in the rankings. There's obviously a hole that hasn't been closed. I'm surprised it's been a month and that hole still hasn't been patched. I have no problem with other legit companies out ranking ours for various keywords. In that case I can feel alright knowing it's just something they were able to do that I wasn't but when I see complete blackhat sites ranking that's a whole different story. Estimated traffic before and after Penguin 2.0: http://goo.gl/gurXt What are they doing that's blackhat? Hidden text - compare the cached version vs. the live http://goo.gl/YYGDK 301ing lots of domains, many irrelevant. http://goo.gl/RjOJu Using a trade marked brand (steelers) - not SEO related but I'm sure the NFL wouldn't be happy. Linking between other domains they own. Notice how spammy these sites are. http://pittsburghwebdevelopment.org/2013/06/23/website-development-firm-website-design-pittsburgh/ http://seoinpgh.com/2013/06/23/website-designer-pittsburgh-affordable-web-design-in-pittsburgh-pa/ They were inflating their social presence. Wanted to show you but looks like twitter already took care of them https://twitter.com/seopittsburgh . Also making client sites link to them . http://pittsburghpaplumbing.com/2013/06/19/pittsburgh-plumbersplumbers-in-pittsburgh-paplumber-pittsburgh/ I've talked to other people and they've seen similar things. Thoughts, opinions? Can you find one good reason why this site would rank well for a competitive phrase?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eyeflow0 -
How can I recover from an 'unnatrual' link penalty?
Hi I believe our site may have been penalised due to over optimised anchor text links. Our site is http://rollerbannerscheap.co.uk It seems we have been penalised for the key word 'Roller Banner' as the over optimised anchor text contains key word 'Roller Banner' or 'Roller Banners'. We dropped completely off page 1 for 'Roller Banner', how would I recover from this error?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SO_UK0 -
How fast should I make links
I have an eCommerce site. I like to review 100 of my products on Squidoo. There will be 50 lenses each lens will review 2-4 products. Each lens will link to each product review and one link to website URL. at the end of the project I would make around 200-250 links to my site. How should I extent the work. Should I do it within a month? of course I will do my other link buildings along with this task Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | giftbasket4kids0 -
Clear out Spammy Links
I was looking at my Open Site Explorer, and I noticed that now we have link anchor text in terrible words (porn videos, free streaming porn movies, big black c*ck) I believe this is an ex employee who we caught doing black hat seo and now they are retaliating. Has anyone had this happen to them? I need to know how to remove these links and make it stop. We have had a slight decline in our ranking as well, and wasn't sure if it could be the result of all this spamming. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AmandaJ0 -
Massive rank drop for 'unnatural links' . Help!
Hi Everyone, I work for a company called Danbro - www.danbro.co.uk Recently a massive penalty lead to a huge drop across all keywords in Google including the brand name. Since we have conducted a massive clean up; (requesting competitors to remove duplicate content, removing some poor quality links etc etc) We still have not seen any improvement whatsoever nor has Google responded. Has anyone ever received a positive response from Google? Since we sent a reconsideration request our ranks actually went worse!! Any advice would be great
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Townpages0