Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Do we have too many links in our footer?
-
Hi guys, we have 41 links on our holiday(vacation) rental website, this seems too many when looking at best practice. 24 of these are links to community pages while 8 link to activities pages. The community and activity pages are also accessible from links on the top menu so they are not strictly necessary but do get 10% of site clickthroughs according to Google in-page analytics. I therefore do not want to remove the links if there is no good evidence that google will penalize us for this. What do you think would be best for our site? Thanks, John Tulley.
-
Hi,
Yes the footer links are sitewide.
** Then I am sure those are not all 100% relevant for every page and you are spliting the Page Rank juice / equity / votes to all of the pages linked for all pages.
I would suggest to keep in the footer:
-
links that user can actually click on and links to releveant pages vs the pages they are placed on
-
links that are not in the page (menu, body, side bars etc)
Yes all the links (apart from the corporate links are duplicated in the menubar under the page header.
** They it will make sense to keep there only the ones that are really important not all of them. And again, like stated above, you are spliting the votes to all links per page no matter what if the links are duplicated or not. More then that the anchor text of the footer links won't matter anyway as only the first one is taken in consideration and since the other are above those will be considered.
-
-
I'd be wary of that community page, however it's extremely unlikely that one page will have a negative impact across the whole website, so it's not a high priority
As mentioned below, reducing the footer on internal pages might be an option?
-
Hi eyepaq,
Thanks for the reply,
Yes the footer links are sitewide.
Yes all the links (apart from the corporate links are duplicated in the menubar under the page header.
Do you then recommend just having the corporate links in the footer?
-
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the reply, most of our property pages have between 110 and 140 links per page. Our community pages may be a problem as they list each property on a community and for each property there is 5 image links and 2 text links. One community page lists 28 properties and that page has a total of 305 links.
-
Hi,
For sure you won't get a penalty for having too many links in the footer. More then that you don't have that many anyway.
Is this footer site wide ? ( on all pages of the site ). A good idea is to have a more heavy footer on the home page only and have a more dedicated version on the inner pages.
Are those link also available in the body of the page / pages since you do have some clicks on those but GA shows the links CTR overall not per individual links so that means maybe the users are not actually clicking on the links in the fotter if those are also available in the header, body side bars etc.
If yes, that will "harm" you in the way that you split all internal link equity to all links per page including those in the footer - so as far as structure is not really a good idea as I am sure some pages that are linked from your pages - all around - including the footer are more important then others but you are actually diluting those "votes" by having that many links per page all around.
Again, the bottom line is that there is no way you will get a penalty but:
-
google might not follow all links if you don't have enough authority
-
some of your important pages won't get the needed "attention" due to the fact that you are linking to that many pages from all pages of your site.
-
-
John,
41 links for a footer area, whilst it is a large number, isn't too many really. You should be careful on the total number of links on the page however. I believe you should try to cap it at 100, but I think I've read somewhere 200+ is classed excessive
Hope this helps!
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
-
How many keywords should I optimize a page for?
Hi, There is a lot of debate going on on whether to use a single keyword per page or multiple keywords per page. What I know for sure is that it is not advisable to repeat the same exact keyword in different pages. I need to optimize product pages, categories and pages for an online store and still do not know if it is better to: 1-work with one main keyword per page plus latent semantic keywords, 2-to optimize a page for multiple different keywords (2 to 4 keywords) which are strongly related to the main topic or to the product sold in a particular product page 3- use single keyword for each page (and no more than one keyword per page). Some seo gurus argue this is the best way to get higher ranking for that particular page in the serps. My personal opinion would be 1 or 2, but I would like to hear what you suggest and think about it. Any suggestion or opinion is welcome and appreciated. Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | cinzia090 -
Removing navigation menu items/links on homepage
We are redesigning our website after a long stint with an SEO firm who also handled our design/dev. We want to clean up the links on our homepage but don't want to screw up our IA or SEO. We want to delete some navbar menu items and a whole bunch on random links to our evergreen content below the fold. Would we need to reposition those navbar items/content links to our footer or somewhere else on the homepage to maintain our internal linking structure? It would be great if you could take a look at our site and give us any suggestions or advice on the best way to go about this. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Lorne_Marr1 -
Is it bad to include google Maps in footer?
We have 5 locations and we were thinking about including a map for each location in the footer. These would be set-up as no-follow links. They could potentially enhance user experience but it also increases size of footer. Right now there are just basic links to pages (sitemap, terms, etc), contact info, social links, and contact form. If we did the maps it would also include link to the individual location pages. Not sure if we are doing too much in footer or need to just keep it basic. Thanks for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | Restore0 -
Does the link title attribute benefit seo?
Hello, Anyone could tell me the benefit SEO of link title attribute. Is **Link Title **ranking factor? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh0 -
Reducing number crawl-able links?
Hello, I just like to ask for best practice when it comes to reduce number of internal links on a site with a mega menu. Since the mega menu lists all categories and all their subcategories it creates a problem when all categories are linking to all categories directly.. Would the method below reduce the number of links and preventing the link juice flowing directly from category to category? [(link built with JavaScript and the html5 "data-" attribute) Thinking of using these links to categories in the menu not directly below the parent category.](#)
On-Page Optimization | | AJPro0 -
How do I PERMANENTLY change an incorrect URL link with one of my keywords?
Hello, I received an “F” grade on my on-page report for one of my keywords. I noticed that the URL linked with that keyword was wrong. After changing it to the correct URL, I received an “A.” However, the change was not permanent. How do I permanently change the URL? I don’t see any “Save Changes” or “Apply Changes” button anywhere. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | jampaper0 -
Wordpress category links not working
Hi All of sudden, my category links are not working. Any tips on figuring out what's causing this? Looks like permalink problem with newer wordpress version. I turned off all the plugins see if this cause any problems. Still not being able to find any option. Here's my site http://www.hibebefetaldoppler.com/fetal-doppler-questions-and-answers/ Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | BistosAmerica0 -
Prevent link juice to flow on low-value pages
Hello there! Most of the websites have links to low-value pages in their main navigation (header or footer)... thus, available through every other pages. I especially think about "Conditions of Use" or "Privacy Notice" pages, which have no value for SEO. What I would like, is to prevent link juice to flow into those pages... but still keep the links for visitors. What is the best way to achieve this? Put a rel="nofollow" attribute on those links? Put a "robots" meta tag containing "noindex,nofollow" on those pages? Put a "Disallow" for those pages in a "robots.txt" file? Use efficient Javascript links? (that crawlers won't be able to follow)
On-Page Optimization | | jonigunneweg0
