How to minimalise links in your footer
-
Hi guys,
I'm working on the website to improve the internal linking structure. We have thousand of pages, and on every single page we have the same footer with the same links. For this reason I would like to change the footer in only relevant links for the user, but also for the robots. So for the user I leave in the general main links Home / Contact / Promotions and customise a part of the links to specific links about the section they are looking at.
Now my idea was to add to the General Main links a Nofollow, so I direct the robots in a better structure about how to read the website.
I have been reading a lot about internal linkbuilding- like http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday and
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/information-architecture-rocket-science-simplified/22503/
and a lot more, too much to display all. but my question would be, is it smart to internally start using NOFOLLOW's on links.
because I do found also some negative comments on this approach
http://www.dashboardjunkie.com/noindex-nofollow-canonical-and-disallow
I hope to get some feedback from the community to make up my mind.
-
Hi Letty,
I agree with the others here. There are exceptions, but for the most part you want Google to be able to follow most of the links on your site. The rule can be broken, but as a best practice there's usually no harm in following your links.
That said, I'm a big, huge fan of link consolidation and faceted navigation.
I've seen a lot of positive results from sites that have cleaned up and consolidated thier footer links, so I'm hopeful about what you're doing!
-
I second the dofollow advice from Oleg. Nofollow is not the way to go here.
I just want to add that your footer links need to be "relevant" to a person coming in to ANY page on your site. That's how I try to build them. Obviously there are some common ones, home, contact, etc. If the link in the footer is only specific to a particular part of your website and wouldn't be helpful to someone coming into a different section, then remove them. If it will help ANYONE no matter what page they are on, then keep them.
-
The opinions about the usage of internal nofollow links are mixed, but since Google changed how they treat nofollowed links using nofollow for internal links is not such a good idea.
Basically you are loosing link juice.
Now, what you can do, is to have (if possible) targeted links in the footer (if you are using WP you can accomplish that by using conditional tags).
The idea is to let PR flow naturally. This is the conclusion of my readings.
Spare 2 minutes and check out this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4SAPUx4Beh8
-
If you are trying to consolidate link authority by changing some links to be nofollow, that won't work. This would have worked a few years back when nofollow was used for pagerank sculpting, but G has changed the way these links are treated.
I would dofollow all the internal links on your site.
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
-
Breadcrumbs versus in context link
Hi, I remember reading that links within the text have more value than breadcrumbs links for example because in context links are surrounded by the right content (words) but google search engine optimisation starter guide says breadcrumbs are good, so which one is recommended ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
How would you build links to this page?
Hi i have ecommerce store and currently we are looking to build links to category pages like: http://www.theiconic.com.au/womens-clothing-dresses-party-dresses/ What are some natural ways to build links to a page like this? Our SEO agency has done guest posting and forums but these are not natural link building methods and against Google policy. Any suggestions on how to build natural links to these pages? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak651 -
Link Building Strategy?
If I use unique content written from writers & post it to good sites (free blogs, bookmarking, directory, articles sites, etc.) having nice good cache, good PR, different IP's do i still have a chance of get hit by Spam actions of google? Planning to do like just 30-50 a month all with unique content or say 1 unique content then re-written & used not more than 3 times. If not this then What else would you suggest? One more thing to add up, like i have 1000+ pages out of which i have like 80-90 pages that matters to me (important pages) then how do I spin the anchor text between all the pages. Should i spin them between 1000+ pages or use only 80-90 IMP pages. If the content is 300 words let say then how many anchor tags should i have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
PR links
Its seems that at lot of or competitors are using PR site to place articles with links. They are using the same article across many sites with the same anchor text link - But they seem to be doing very well in the rankings.... I have steered away from this type of linking as I assumed Google wouldn't be keen on this type of activity but I seem to be wrong.... Any views on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Best links to gain?
Hi, Just a quick one to see what peoples thoughts are regarding links. I have just gained a free link on a .gov website in the UK. In one of their offers pages, will this provide any link value or domain trust to me and what can the benefits be SEO wise from having a link on a government domain? The link is just the website url with a a few lines of text detailing our address etc... so its not got any anchor text regarding targetting one of our brands. It is equallly, less or more important to target anchor text links to specific brands or to get good high quality links from trusted sites such as the .gov one I have linking to my root domain? The website is a local council website in the UK. And was listed by a member of their staff, who only list in the offer page if your offering discount to council members etc..., so its not a spammed page or anything like that. What are peoples views on anchor text links vs domain url links? Cheers Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
Link to domain
Let's say i want to rank for rental car service and purchases a domain rental-car-service and creates a site http://www.rental-car-service.com There will be few persons who won't use anchor text to link to the site, but will simply link using URL ( in this case http://www.rental-car-service.com ) So, will a link to http://www.rental-car-service.com from another site using http://www.rental-car-service.com as anchor text help the keyword rental car service ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Does having multiple links to the same page influence the Link juice this page is able to pass
Say you have a page and it has 4 outgoing links to the same internal page. In the original Pagerank algo if these links were links to an page outside your own domain, this would mean that the linkjuice this page is able to pass would be devided by 4. The thing is i'm not sure if this is also the case when the outgoing link, is linking to a page on your own domain. I would say that outgoing links (whatever the destination) will use some of your link juice, so it would be better to have 1 outgoing link instead of 4 to the same destination, the the destination will profit more form that link. What are you're thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TjeerdvZ0 -
How And/Or If To Prune Footer Links
Hi, I have a site with a site-wide footer that currently has 28 internal links.The footer terms are the terms the pages are focused on. This footer is on every page of the site (hundreds of pages). Some pages of my site have 10 or so additional links pointing to internal and external pages (besides the footer) and some pages (like the homepage) have about 50 links besides the footer. I'm going for a half dozen new terms with new pages that I would be adding to the site-wide footer. Do you think I should trim the existing footer before adding these new terms? I guess I would remove the terms that show no real hope of ever getting to page one... like pages stuck in the 40s. Or, pages I for whatever reason don't care much if they rank or not. Would trimming it to a smaller number do more to help the remaining linked pages/terms? What do you think? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010