Putting blog excerpts in footer of every page?
-
I have roughly 150 non-blog pages and 500 articles in my blog.
The footer of every non-blog page includes excerpts from 3 blog posts selected at random from the inventory of 500.
The posts in the footer of each page change with every page refresh.
So, if you scroll to the bottom of any non-blog page, you'll see about 85 words for each of 3 randomly selected blog posts, with a link to the source article in the blog section of my site. Each page will link to 3 different posts.
One of my objectives is to drive visitors to some older blog content that has become buried deep in the archives over the years.
Question 1: In a post-Panda/Penguin world, is this a good or bad technique?
Question 2: Should the links to the full content in the blog use rel="nofollow"? Without it, the internal link structure for this part of the site looks pretty crazy and random - I assume nofollow would help make things look more orderly (and prevent my main non-blog pages from passing excess link juice to my blog).
Thoughts or comments?
-
On my site, I have a sidebar widget that links to 10 random pages on my site. I would love to have it link to 10 relevant pages on my site as EGOL suggests...It's on my list of things to program one day!
I do feel that these are helpful to me. The main reason why I like this widget is because I think it helps me keep my pages in Google's index. My site has over 3000 pages and I think many of them would end up in the supplemental index if they were not regularly linked to internally like they are.
Also, I have it set so that they link using my desired anchor text for the page. This may help somewhat in my SERPs for each page.
Oh, and all of these links are followed on my site.
-
I think that 45 words is too much. I would use a title. Or a title and a few words. Or, a title and a sexy sentence.
Last, a new question: Can you think of ANY good reason to put blog excerpts in a site-wide footer the way http://springboard.com/ and http://seoaware.com do?
Yes, but only until I had time to do something better.
-
Thanks for a very thoughtful reply; I agree that it's important to promote the best content, and I definitely do that.
I misspoke earlier - the excerpts are just the title and 45 words, not 85. Maybe 3 sentences. Do you still think this is a duplicate content risk?
Last, a new question: Can you think of ANY good reason to put blog excerpts in a site-wide footer the way http://springboard.com/ and http://seoaware.com do? I currently do it randomly; these other sites excerpt the latest posts.
-
These are in the footer? How many people are going all the way down there and clicking on them? I bet nobody. If nobody is clicking them then why do this?
I would run crazyegg on a few pages to see if anybody is clicking these links.
The footer of every non-blog page includes excerpts from 3 blog posts selected at random from the inventory of 500.
If you really want to get people into these posts your best bet would be to link to relevant rather than random? Don't you think?
Almost any blog that has 500 posts is going to have some really good ones and some real sleepers. I would focus on promoting the really good ones if you want people to click these.
Promote your best. Not random.
So, if you scroll to the bottom of any non-blog page, you'll see about 85 words for each of 3 randomly selected blog posts, with a link to the source article in the blog section of my site. Each page will link to 3 different posts.
Eighty five words for each? Wow... that is a lot... Way more than I would use. How a bout a title and ten words. Nobody is going to read these.
I think that you could run into duplicate content issues with this - even though they are shuffled randomly.
Question 1: In a post-Panda/Penguin world, is this a good or bad technique?
You can see my answers above. I think that the footer is bad location and I think that you should promote your best instead of random.
Question 2: Should the links to the full content in the blog use rel="nofollow"? Without it, the internal link structure for this part of the site looks pretty crazy and random - I assume nofollow would help make things look more orderly (and prevent my main non-blog pages from passing excess link juice to my blog).
I would not use nofollow on links within my own website. When you use nofollow the pagerank that would have flowed into those links evaporates. It is lost. Poof! Instead, allow the pagerank to flow into these pages and out through their links. If you nofollow you cut off the power.
-
Ben,
Thanks for the reply. I didn't know about the nofollow on the internal links.
Yes, the body of every page has unique content.
My entire site revolves around serving the needs of a specific type of individual, and the content in the body and the content in the blog work together to fill the information needs of the visitor - so hopefully yes, the blog content is relevant.
I see lots of websites incorporating a blog excerpt in the footers or sidebars of their pages (e.g., http://springboard.com/ and http://seoaware.com). The problem I have is that they almost always link to the most recent blog post(s), concentrating attention on a small subset of the blog inventory. That means older, still-relevant, still-useful content is getting neglected. That's the main thing I'm trying to overcome.
I do have good site search so people who know what they are looking for can find it - the problem is that many people don't know what they want until they see it.
Thanks again!
-
Question 2 first - I don't think there's any need for the no-follow at all. In fact I'm pretty certain Google have gone on record saying that you'll never need to no-follow with internal links.
Question 1 - If you've got some unique content in the main body of the page I wouldn't foresee it being a problem. However you should probably be asking yourself if it's actually of any use to the user? Is the content you're sending them to relevant to what they're looking for and is it improving their overall experience on your site?
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
-
I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks0 -
Some Issues about my Blog
I am facing issue regarding to my Blog https://digitalmedialine.com/blog/. As some pages are not Rank in google yet. Can Anyone help me out how to rank those blogs to improve my Traffic. Thanks in Advance.
Technical SEO | | qwaswd0 -
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical.
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical. https://studyplaces.com/about-us/ The pages affected by this include: https://studyplaces.com/50-best-college-party-songs-of-all-time-and-why-we-love-them/ https://studyplaces.com/15-best-minors-for-business-majors/ As you can see the content on these pages is totally unrelated to the content on the about-us page. Any ideas why this is happening and how to resolve.
Technical SEO | | pnoddy0 -
Website SEO Product Pages - Condense Product Pages
We are managing a website that has seen consistently dropping rankings over the last 2 years (http://www.independence-bunting.com/). Our long term strategy has been purely content-based and is of high quality, but isn’t seeing the desired results. It is an ecommerce site that has a lot of pages, most of which are category or product pages. Many of the product pages have duplicate or thin content, which we currently see as one of the primary reasons for the ranking drops.The website has many individual products which have the same fabric and size options, but have different designs. So it is difficult to write valuable content that differs between several products that have similar designs. Right now each of the different designs has its own product page. We have a dilemma, because our options are:A.Combine similar designs of the product into one product page where the customer must choose a design, a fabric, and a size before checking out. This way we can have valuable content and don’t have to duplicate that content on other pages or try to find more to say about something that there really isn’t anything else to say about. However, this process will remove between 50% and 70% of the pages on the website. We know number of indexed pages is important to search engines and if they suddenly see that half of our pages are gone, we may cause more negative effects despite the fact that we are in fact aiming to provide more value to the user, rather than less.B.Leave the product pages alone and try to write more valuable content for each product page, which will be difficult because there really isn’t that much more to say, or more valuable ways to say it. This is the “safe” option as it means that our negative potential impact is reduced but we won’t necessarily see much positive trending either. C.Test solution A on a small percentage of the product categories to see any impact over the next several months before making sitewide updates to the product pages if we see positive impact, or revert to the old way if we see negative impact.Any sound advice would be of incredible value at this point, as the work we are doing isn’t having the desired effects and we are seeing consistent dropping rankings at this point.Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Ed-iOVA0 -
Many Pages Being Combined Into One Long Page
Hi All, In talking with my internal developers, UX, and design team there has been a big push to move from a "tabbed" page structure (where as each tab is it's own page) to combining everything into one long page. It looks great from a user experience standpoint, but I'm concerned that we'll decrease in rankings for the tabbed pages that will be going away, even with a 301 in place. I initially recommending#! or pushstate for each "page section" on the long form content. However there are technical limitations with this in our CMS. The next idea I had was to still leave those pages out there and to link to them in the source code, but this approach may get shot down as well. Has anyone else had to solve for this issue? If so, how did you do it?
Technical SEO | | AllyBank1 -
Should I put meta descriptions on pages that are not indexed?
I have multiple pages that I do not want to be indexed (and they are currently not indexed, so that's great). They don't have meta descriptions on them and I'm wondering if it's worth my time to go in and insert them, since they should hypothetically never be shown. Does anyone have any experience with this? Thanks! The reason this is a question is because one member of our team was linking to this page through Facebook to send people to it and noticed random text on the page being pulled in as the description.
Technical SEO | | Viewpoints0 -
If my home page never shows up in SERPS but other pages do, does that mean Google is penalizing me?
So my website I do local SEO for, xyz.com is finally getting better on some keywords (Thanks SEOMOZ) But only pages that are like this xyz.com/better_widgets_ or xyz.com/mousetrap_removals Is Google penalizing me possibly for some duplicate content websites I have out there (working on, I know I know it is bad)...
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Secondary Pages Indexed over Primary Page
I have 4 pages for a single product Each of the pages link to the Main page for that product Google is indexing the secondary pages above my preferred landing page How do I fix this?
Technical SEO | | Bucky0