Site wide internal links in footer
-
What is your take on site wide inernal links in the footer, e.g. for the most competitive keywords?
Do you think those links are still useful or are those links of little value from your experience?
It is an old school tactic but I still see many sites doing it.
-
Links from content area seem to be a lot more potent. If you're looking to boost your rankings through internal linking I would find editorial links to be the right way to go if possible. One tip I guess would be to look at preventing double links to same page. For example link from footer goes to same page as link main nav, sidebar and content area.
-
I've read numerous reports that Google effectively ignores (or perhaps not ignore; downgrades) the "site template" - so what appears on every page, e.g. header, footer, sidebar(s) has less effect than links inside the content area.
bear that in mind - a link from your home page content to a category may be more effective.
-
Its still a good technique, provided you do it right. If you have a website that publishes news, you cant have all links in the footer. You must cycle intelligently. Like for Auto section you can have automobile related links in the footer.
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
-
Question on site structure
My client is a nationwide company. They provide building maintenance services in 7 different cities. In each city they provide a different range of services. They currently have a single service page for each service and no mention on that page of the cities they offer the service. The service pages are getting no SERP visibility. We are running Paid Search and recommending SEO. I'm wondering whether it would be beneficial to build out specific service pages for each city so the content is more relevant to both users and search engines. What is best practice in this situation? Client wants to dominate SERPs in each market for the services they offer.
On-Page Optimization | | SEOinSunnyNelson0 -
Moving Site from HTTP to HTTPS
Hi, So the news is that Google has started giving more importance to sites with HTTPS i.e. it is now a new ranking signal. It says that as of now it affects fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high quality content but it may decide to strengthen it as they would like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web. In that case, what should we do? Switching from http:// to https:// means change in urls and low traffic. How to cope with it? Do we have to implement 'n' number of redirects? Regards,
On-Page Optimization | | IM_Learner3 -
Crosslinking Question - Footer or Header?
We own 9 fashion blogs that focus on different niches. We have Your Next Shoes focusing on shoes, Your Next Dress focusing on dresses, Your Next Handbag focusing on handbags, and so on. Previously we had links in the blog header to the other sister sites. Your Next Shoes had text links to its 8 sister sites, and so on. However, we were told that this could cause a cross-linking penalty, so we removed these links. My understanding now is that the advice we were given is not necessarily correct. We think it is useful for our visitors to see that we also operate other blogs, so we are thinking of adding back the links - this time to our footer. Basically I am looking for advise on the best way to go about this.
On-Page Optimization | | Jantaro0 -
Internal Linking - in content vs navigation menu
Would like to get some thoughts on whether navigation menus or in-content links are best for internal linking, from an SEO standpoint. A few thoughts to get started with: For sites with a lot of content, you can have a navigation menu linking to your higher-level pages, then in-content links to deeper pages on your site. For smaller sites, this is not an option, as the navigation menu will probably link to all your important pages. You could add in-content links, but Google only counts the first link on the page, so the in-content links would be ignored if you'd already linked yp the page in your top nav menu. I can think of several possible reasons navigation menu links could be less desirable than in content links from a Google perspective. (They are sitewide boilerplate content without context.) If you setup your navigation structure based on what is best for the user, small sites don't have much wiggle room to optimize internal link structure, as all their money pages will be linked to from the top nav menu. Do you think Google prefers in content links to navigation menu links? If so, how do you get around the fact that for many sites, all their money pages are being linked to from their main navigation menu?
On-Page Optimization | | AdamThompson0 -
How important are internal pages to overall site rank?
This seems like it should be an easy question (and probably is), but it has stumped a few of us over the past few days. Here's the scenario: We have a site that we are trying to optimize to rank well for a set of keywords. We have a lot of internal pages that are important to users when they visit the site (case studies, for example), but they aren't the pages that we want people to find when they search for our primary keywords. Our question is, is it valuable to optimize those internal pages for our keywords? In other words, will having a lot of internal pages that mention our keywords affect how well our overall site ranks for those keywords? Or, is it only important to have one "hero" page for our important keywords? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | omg_jlsa0 -
Changing my site (dramatically)
I am about to do a complete site change. I am going to WordPress. I am ranked #2 on SERPS. Will I lose rank for changing everything on my site? I have 500 pages indexed but I am about to have 30k indexed. It is a real estate site that is switching from a "framed" solution, to a listing indexed solution. If I make good use of my keywords etc (on site optimization) will I be at risk of losing risk just for changing my site?
On-Page Optimization | | JML11790 -
Remove internal site SERPS from Google Index?
1. Internal Serp pages did not have a robots meta tag 2. As a result, client site has thousands (~4,400) of internal site SERP pages in the Google index. 3. We added the NoIndex, Follow attribute to all internal SERPS 4. We Disallowed: domain.com/internal-search-operator in Robots.txt 5. No new SERP pages are being indexed, but the other 4000 something that were already there are still in the index weeks later. 6. The pages are dynamically created and still work, so I can't use the Remove Content tool from google, because the pages don't 404. Is there any way to get these pages out of the index besides just waiting and hoping google eventuall drops them? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | delegator.com0 -
Internal link to the home page
When building menus and other internal links, should the link to the home page be http://www.domain.com/ or http://www.domain.com/index.html or does it matter? Best,
On-Page Optimization | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0