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
-
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
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 | | Cassie_Ransom0 -
How can I stop a tracking link from being indexed while still passing link equity?
I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this: http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/ The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com. Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding Disallow: /clkn/ in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page. How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?
Technical SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
CSS background image links bad for seo?
On one of the websites I manage SEO for, the developers are changing how our graphical links are coded. They're basically coding in such away where there is no anchor text and no alt tag, so for example: So there's no anchor nor alt context for Google's crawler. How badly will this affect SEO, or is it extremely minimal and I shouldn't worry about? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JimLynch0 -
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 | | ckroaster0 -
Links from Instructables.com?
This is a silly newbie question. But will posting on www.instructables.com with some valuable content and url link back to my site help with "linking"? Or do they put a no-follow on all links on their site? Thanks for answering! Ron
Technical SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
International Seo - Canada
Our organization is currently only operating in the USA but will soon be entering the Canadian market. We did a lot of research and decided that for our needs it would be best to use a subfolder for Canada. Initially we will be targeting the english speaking community but eventually we will want to expand to the french speaking Canadians as well. The question is - is there a preferred version in setting up the subfolders: www.website.org/ca/ -- default will be english www.website.org/ca/fr/ - french www.website.org/en-ca/ - english www.website.org/fr-ca/ - french www.website.org/ca/en/ -english www.website.org/ca/fr/ - french Thanks
Technical SEO | | Morris770 -
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 | | Scratch_MM0