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 a bunch of footer internal links help or hurt?
-
We are an ecommerce site...
In days gone by, having a bunch of footer links with your top products / categories was a good idea - as it created a ton of internal links to these products.
Now, I am hearing that those links "dilute" the value of our other links on a page - and essentially, there is more harm than good from these.
Does anyone know what I am talking about (the olds days) and should we still be doing this?
Thanks
-
Hello Ted, yes they can hurt your site in a number of ways. Site owners tend to make these links anchor text rich, so if you've got a link in your footer saying 'Blue Widgets' then effectively you may have 30+ anchor text links from your own site. And yes, anchor text backlink ratios are calculated with the inclusion of internal links from your own site.
As you also mentioned, these footer links are draining the juice out of your main contextual links within in your main page's copy. Effectively, those nice internal silo links you send to your inner pages are being watered down by all of your dofollow footer links.
So do I make all of my footer and menu links no-follow then? And there's the problem. You won't find definitive answers on this because it's grey hat. Google will tell you that nofollow links are links that you don't want to vouch for. So are you going to send a signal to Google that tells them you don't trust internal links on your own site because you added the nofollow attribute to them?
And yes, whether the link is nofollow or not, it's still included in your overall anchor text ratios.
Now we move into PR sculpting. Google will tell you not to do that, and that PR sculpting doesn't work anyway. Is that because it still works very well indeed? Why are there so many authoritative sites that still use the nofollow attribute on some of their internal links? Don't they trust these internal links, or are they channeling link juice to the pages they want it diverted to.
If the rest of your link profile was pretty clean, and all of your offsite SEO was above board, then I think you'd be pretty unlucky to get a penalty from internal links coming from the footer of your own site.
One of my sites is ranking top three for many medium to semi-hard keywords that uses PR sculpting. Every single menu and footer link is nofollow. So the homepage has about 30 nofollow internal links on it, and only two contextual links in the main copy that link to the other inner pages that I wanted to rank.
That site has remained top 3 for over 1.5 years now without a hitch. This definitely isn't conclusive evidence by any means. The site itself is very strong and has great content too, but it seems as though all of the nofollow links haven't affected it negatively. And the inner pages that I sent all of the juice to are ranking #1 too. In my opinion PR sculpting does work but I also think it's dicey.
In your situation, I would maybe just dial down the exact match anchor text and change them to partial match links. Google do devalue your internal footer links to a certain degree but there's no black and white answer. If your site is big, then your generating 100's of anchor text links, and although they're devalued, it's still a bit dicey.
-
Yes, there was a period when footers were getting extremely large (and link laden) in order to try and drive as much link strength as possible to internal pages, and this was spread out through out the site. Here's a blog post from a couple of years ago that looks into it even more thoroughly: http://moz.com/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond. But both Moz and Zappos have thinned down their footer links though from even this example. Rand also goes into general home page design (and why people have moved away from keyword stuffing on it) here: http://moz.com/blog/what-should-i-put-on-the-homepage-whiteboard-friday, which also helps get to footer links in a round about way. Cheers!
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 much internal linking?
Hi everyone, Too much of anything is not good. In terms of internal linking, how many are too many? I read that the recommended internal links are about 100 links per page otherwise it dilutes the page's link equity. I have a concern about one of our websites - according to search console, the homepage has 923 internal links. All the pages have a corresponding /feed page added to the page URL, which is really weird (is this caused by a plugin?). The site also has an e-com feature, but it is not used as the site is essentially a brochure and customers are encouraged to visit the shop. I assume the e-com feature also increases this number. On the other hand, one of the competitors we are tracking has 1 internal link site-wide. Ours is at 45,000 site-wide. How is it possible to only have 1 internal link? Is this a Moz bug? I know we also need to reduce our internal links badly, however, I'm not sure where to start. I don't know how these internal links are linked together - some aren't in the copy or navigation menu. When I scan the homepage links using 'check my links', the total links identified for the homepage is only 170. kAeYlTM
On-Page Optimization | | nhhernandez0 -
Link in H1 tag?
Hi guys, We're working through a redesign of our product page and are considering the following: http://screencast.com/t/NBSsDGA9vgS3 Currently the product name (including the brand name - Arc'teryx) in this case is included in the H1 and none of the title is linked. You can see this here: http://www.evo.com/synthetic-jackets/arcteryx-atom-lt-hoodie-womens.aspx The firm we're working with is proposing keeping the entire title in the H1 but linking the brand name to the entire brand assortment. My concern is that the brand name is a critical part of the product title and should be text (not a link). Any suggestions? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | evoNick
Will0 -
Alt text / internal linking
Hi everyone A question about best practice when linking from pictures on our homepage - hirespace.com We have an option of using divs with background images (nicer in terms of design) but it means that we can't use anchor text or alt text to show Google what these internal links are about. The other option is to use images which do not allow us as much flexibility in terms of CSS but would allow us to use alt text. There is also an opinion that we should have separate text links at the bottom of the homepage to get the anchor page in. What is best practice in this situation - is alt text worth sacrificing some CSS flexibility for? How important is anchor/alt text for internal linking? Thanks guys.
On-Page Optimization | | HireSpace0 -
Is a Mega Menu with over 300 links in it hurting my rankings?
I got hit pretty badly by Panda 4.0 (1/3 of my traffic lost), and I'm fairly certain it was because Google had potentially indexed over 20 million pages from a site filtering piece of software and got done for duplicate content. I have since fixed that using URL Parameters and that 20 million is down to 2.7 million now and I have submitted a clean site map, so now I wait. I have just done a site relaunch and am trying to determine if there are any other issues. I run an online store, and I have a mega menu with well over 300 links in it - makes the user experience really quick and easy to jump exactly where you want - and then I have about 30 links in the footer. I know there's a 'no more than 100 links on a page' guideline for Moz, but does anyone know if Google is smart enough to see the same header / footer navigation structure on every page of a site and know it's navigation and not water down the rest of the links, or do I need to re-think and simplify my navigation? It's one of those things that's there for a user experience and now I'm worried that I'm being penalised. The site is www dot shopnaturally dot com dot au
On-Page Optimization | | sparrowdog0 -
Best practice for Portfolio Links
I have a client with a really large project portfolio (over 500 project images), which causes their portfolio page to have well over the 100 links that are recommended. How can I reduce this without reducing the number of photos they can upload?
On-Page Optimization | | HochKaren0 -
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 -
Navigation Links Causing Too Many Links Help?
Hello, I have read some SEOMOZ search results for this, but am still concerned that Google may see 4,500 Too Many Link warnings as a problem. This is caused primarily due to our header navigation, which is not intended to be keyword stuffing, but to provide all avenues for our breadth of content. site: crazymikesapps.com. Most answers seem to advise if there is no keyword stuffing at hand don't worry about it. Any help appreciated. thank you Mike
On-Page Optimization | | crazymikesapps0 -
Tag clouds: good for internal linking and increase of keyword relevant pages?
As Matt Cutts explained, tag clouds are OK if you're not engaged in keyword stuffing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYPX_ZmhLqg) - i.e. if you're not putting in 500 tags. I'm currently creating tags for an online-bookseller; just like Amazon this e-commerce-site has potentially a couple of million books. Tag clouds will be added to each book detail page in order to enrich each of these pages with relevant keywords both for search engines and users (get a quick overview over the main topics of the book; navigate the site and find other books associated with each tag). Each of these book-specific tag clouds will hold up to 50 tags max, typically rather in the range of up to 10-20. From an SEO perspective, my question is twofold: 1. Does the site benefit from these tag clouds by improving the internal linking structure? 2. Does the site benefit from creating lots of additional tag-specific-pages (up to 200k different tags) or can these pages become a problem, as they don't contain a lot of rich content as such but rather lists of books associated with each tag? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | semantopic0