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.
Static Links in Sidebar Hurting SEO?
-
Our website currently has a sidebar/widget area that appears on almost all pages throughout of entire site (350 page domain). In that sidebar, we have some static links and some non-static links. Right now there are:
6 Related Post Links - Non-Static
1 - Call To Action - Static to a landing page
10 Calculators - Static - These calculators I think are very useful to our users (financial website).So in total 17 total sidebar links, 11 static links, and 6 which change based on the content of the page. Do you think these static links from an SEO perspective can be hurting us? Is there some sort of best practice for sidebar links in regards to quantity as well as static vs non-static?
Thanks!
-
Tons of great advice here. My responsive design drops the sidebar to below 5% of the average scroll depth so I binned it and nothing bad happened to pages per session or time on site or bouncerate or any of the important user signals. I do have a site-wide 'BOOK AN EMERGENCY APPOINTMENT' button but people use it and we're killing it for emergencies. It's one of our best catagories and is hotly competitive. It's in red and replaced a trustpilot widget that was taking people off site.
One of the best decisions I ever made and I was tearing my hair out about site wide links messing with SEO but it didn't happen for us. All the google results were 'no it's SPAMMY' - but they are just a load of content creators jumping on a bandwagon, here in the Moz community, as you can see, things are more nuanced.
So if it's relevant and helpful keep it. Do you have Hotjar. Allows you to see what peope are clicking on.
SWL and footer links Is one of those where spammy sites use it so people say - "ooh don't ever use it" - but you must not be that binary. If it helps the users then keep it. In my case hardly anyone used them so I dropped them in favour of one important button.
But an additional bump in pageviews and time on site because people are navigating around your site is absolute gold. So you must encourage that. but remember Cialdini's jam experiment. More than three choices is going to induce decisional paralysis especially when you have only a second and the user is almost making unconscious decisions navigating. It's like driving. You're not thinking what you're doing - it's automatic. So make is fluid and easy and watch the user feedback signals.
How about "Learn more", "buy something" or 'back to navigation'
-
That's the way a lot of people have their responsiveness configured. There are many who drop the sidebar. Others move elements of the sidebar into the content to make the options visible higher in the page.
-
Yeah I was talking about desktop when talking about the sidebar, but in mobile it does move just below the main content and is still visible.
-
When I hear the word "sidebar" these days, I think of a desktop site. I don't think of "sidebars" on a mobile site.
If you are talking "desktop" and you have a mobile version of your site, does that sidebar appear in any format on the mobile site? If not, your sidebar will not be an SEO consideration once Google and your site move to the mobile index. At that time you will lose any SEO benefit (or curse) that the sidebar added to the desktop version of your website.
This is the issue about the mobile first index that very few people are talking about and a lot of people havn't even thought about.
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
-
Do long UTM codes hurt SEO?
Since most UTM codes/URLs are longer than 70ish characters, is this hurting my SEO? If it is, how can I solve the problem while still using a UTM code? Thanks!
Technical SEO | Nov 16, 2018, 7:30 PM | Cassie_Ransom0 -
Static or dynamic category pages for seo
Hi, I'm developing an accommodation site with a limited number of properties in 8 categories. I had been looking at making the properties blog posts and then using category function to show lists but its going to require a lot of customisation and I have seo concerns about the dynamic content as the category page is crucial. As I don't have a lot to add and listings will remain the same my latest thought was to create all as pages. However if I create a page with a list of 12 properties on a category page is there anyway of adding some sorting criteria to that page (would be 7 options - swimming pool, near beach, on site creche, budget, mid-range, luxury) Thanks for any tips Neil
Technical SEO | Dec 19, 2015, 1:42 PM | neilhenderson0 -
Referencing links in Articles and Blogs
Hi I am wondering if the <sup>tag in html is picked up by google as a reference point?</sup> I.e when you put a superscript in word it puts a small number next to your sentence. Then you have a list of reference at the end of the blog/article does google recognise this?
Technical SEO | Jun 21, 2015, 7:22 AM | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Coming soon SEO
Hi, I was wondering what is the best practice to redirect all the links juice by redirecting all the pages of your website to a coming soon page. The coming soon page will point to the domain.com, not to a subfolder. Should I move the entire website to a subfolder and redirect this folder to the coming soon page? Thanks
Technical SEO | Mar 19, 2015, 2:45 PM | bigrat950 -
Do Abbreviations Hurt SEO Results?
We have certain products that we've abbreviated since it's a bit too long. For example, the word Fair Trade Organic is one of our categories and we abbreviate it to FTO. If I put FTO on our meta tag titles and links instead of the actual word, would that provide a weaker result?
Technical SEO | Jul 29, 2013, 5:38 PM | ckroaster0 -
SEO for User Authenticated Content
Hi Everyone - I have a potential client who is seeking SEO for a site that contains about 95% of content only accessible through user authentication . Does anyone have tips for getting this indexed without having to open it up to the public? I was considering adding "snippets" into the robots.txt or creating an additional page with snippets linking to the login page. I'd appreciate any thoughts! Thanks!
Technical SEO | Apr 19, 2013, 3:05 PM | manutx0 -
What is link Schemes?
Hello Friends, Today I am reading about link schemes on http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356 there are a several ways how to avoid Google penalties and also talk about the low quality links. But I can't understand about "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links" Is there he talked about low page rank, Alexa or something else?
Technical SEO | Nov 27, 2012, 1:09 PM | KLLC0 -
Does posting an article on multiple sites hurt seo?
A client of mine creates thought leadership articles and pitches multiple sites to host the article on their site to reach different audiences. The sites that pick it up are places such as AdAge and MarketingProfs and we do get link juice from these sources most of the time. Does having the same article on these sites as well as your own hurt your SEO efforts in any way? Could it be recognized as duplicate content? I know the links are great just wondering if there is any other side effects especially when there are no links provided! Thank you!
Technical SEO | May 15, 2012, 11:40 AM | Scratch_MM0