Navigation Links in Footer
-
What are your thoughts about navigation links in the footer? For example: www.chasepaymentech.com - good, bad, or indifferent for SEO?
-
Footer links can definitely be used to enhance user experience and as Steven Ferrino said, "flatten out you site for Google" It is a place where you want to include a sitemap map as well as any other pages that you do not want to necessarily have on your main nav bar.
As far as SEO purposes, this will not really benefit you. I can not say that it won't be of any help, but in my opinion those links are not really optimized and as always, it is better to have in body anchor text links versus bottom footer links.
Best of Luck!
-
I agree. I do it for the user, not for Google, which I think is what Mr. Cutts says to do all the time.
-
One thing to know is that Google often devalues footer links, so while it's usually not a problem to have links in the footer, don't expect them to bring you lots of linkjuice love.
-
Awesome, thank you! I hadn't even thought of that from the user perspective.
-
Thanks so much! I've heard conflicting information about it - a couple of sources said that having all those links in the footer might look spammy to the search engine.
-
Another reason for doing it is for the user experience. They no longer have to scroll back up to the top to change pages. The one problem that I ran into was having too many links on one page by doing this, I fixed it by using an iframe instead. It looks the same, and still provides the linking to the user that I wanted.
-
There are many good reasons to have navigation links in the footer. For example, there might be lower priority pages on your site that are important enough that you still want to flow some link juice to them. Additionally, a homepage link to your HTML sitemap can be a good way to flatten your site architecture, but you usually don't want to put the sitemap link in the header navigation.
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
-
Number of internal links and passing 'link juice' down to key pages.
Howdy Moz friends. I've just been checking out this post on Moz from 2011 and wanted to know how relevant it is today? I'm particularly interested in a number of links we have on our HP potentially harming important landing page rankings because not enough 'link juice is getting to them i.e) are they are being diluted by all the many other links on the page? (deeper pages, faqs, etc etc) It seems strange to me that as Google as has got more sophisticated this would still be that relevant (thus the reason for posting). Anyway, I thought I was definitely worth asking. If we can leverage more out of our on-page efforts then great 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
Homepage canonical url with splash or not with splash? All other links are without but logo links with splash
Hello, There is so much contradicting information about the homepage canonical URL. Many websites have all the links without the trailing splash but their homepage URL still contains the splash. Now Moz is an example with this. Their urls don't have the splash, and their canonical does not have the splash. Why is it so and why so much different ways people have it?
On-Page Optimization | | advertisingcloud0 -
Internal Link Title and Anchor Text Question
So, I am kind of a newbie with all of this stuff, so please bear with me! If you have a chance to look into the domain it's www.noip.com I have checked the internal followed and 301 links. It seems like it is pulling in all of our navigation a funky way. all of those link have no data for the title and the anchor text is Home, Contact Us, Forgot Password?, ETC. Is this correct? I have tried to look into the way other websites are doing it and it seems wrong. I tried to talk to my developer, but he is not so sure. Do we simply need to make more copy on our site that has internal links within the copy with anchor text that is for keywords that I would like to be ranking for? Like Managed DNS? and then that page goes to the managed DNS page? Or what? Sorry if i am not being totally clear. Any help and advice is 110% welcomed!!! Natalie
On-Page Optimization | | vwnatalie0 -
Internal link question
Hello, I was wondering if internal links should be full urls? for instance my coder might put "page-title.html" but I was wondering if its better for seo to have it be the full url "http://www.blah-blah.com/page-title.html" thanks in advance..... I love this place!
On-Page Optimization | | Superflys1 -
Footer-links (navigation)
I want to put navigation links in my footer. I watched the (distilled) whiteboard friday video saying it can be a penalty. How are links in the footer different from links in the navigation. Why don't you get "hit" for putting the word "Real Estate Listings" in the navigation menu? It appears on every one of the 30k pages. I don't get why the links in the footer would have a negative effect if the links in the navigation don't. My example is a real estate website. When people are browsing properties (30k), it is convenient that at the end of the page there is a navigation of areas. I could put the navigation on the sidebar but that would be in essence, the same thing. A wordpress site would dynamically include that sidebar on every page.
On-Page Optimization | | JML11790 -
No Follow Internal Links
Hi Mozzers, I know that this has been asked a few times and answered as well, I would just like to know some more on the internal link count on a page. I ran the SEOmoz report and many of the pages on the website have more than 150+ internal links. Now, should I use the rel=nofollow tag on some pages that I feel are not important? I have a list of pages which are not important from the SEO point of view, but from the usability factors they need to be there so I cannot remove the links to them. So, would be OK to place the rel=nofollow tag on them. My whole purpose is to reduce the count of internal links on the page as seen by SE's. Now, some say that the rel=nofollow tag does not lower the link count, but it can definitely (I believe) prevent the bots time in getting to those pages, which SEOmoz report also quotes. (__When search engine spiders crawl the Internet they are limited by technology resources and are only able to crawl a certain number of links per webpage. ) So, probably I can save their time. Does anyone have any views on this, Cheers,
On-Page Optimization | | RanjeetP0 -
Navigation for search
We are getting ready to launch a site that has great navigation for users, but it is not so great for search engines. As long as we are ethical about it, does anyone see a downside to detecting a bot user agent and displaying different nav to it? I suppose some could consider it cloaking, but I noticed amazon uses this strategy and they don't seem to be getting a big penalty lol. We are not going to do anything shady with it, just offer the bot a different way to access our content. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | altecdesign0 -
Filtered Navigation, Duplicate content issue on an Ecommerce Website
I have navigation that allows for multiple levels of filtering. What is the best way to prevent the search engine from seeing this duplicate content? Is it a big deal nowadays? I've read many articles and I'm not entirely clear on the solution. For example. You have a page that lists 12 products out of 100: companyname.com/productcategory/page1.htm And then you filter these products: companyname.com/productcategory/filters/page1.htm The filtered page may or may not contain items from the original page, but does contain items that are in the unfiltered navigation pages. How do you help the search engine determine where it should crawl and index the page that contains these products? I can't use rel=canonical, because the exact set of products on the filtered page may not be on any other unfiltered pages. What about robots.txt to block all the filtered pages? Will that also stop pagerank from flowing? What about the meta noindex tag on the filitered pages? I have also considered removing filters entirely, but I'm not sure if sacrificing usability is worth it in order to remove duplicate content. I've read a bunch of blogs and articles, seen the whiteboard special on faceted navigation, but I'm still not clear on how to deal with this issue.
On-Page Optimization | | 13375auc30