Is my footer bad? i.e. hurting rankings
-
Just curious what people think of my footer. I think it provides some value.
Not that many people click on it but it doesn't look that bad in my opinion.
Curious what others think. If getting rid of it would help SEO I'd look into it. I outsource all my coding though so don't want to spend money tweaking what doesn't need to be done.
Thanks for the help!
-
I really liked what Daniel said about using Crazy Egg to analyze user behavior, but you can also do something similar using Google Analytics.
Unfortunately, my suspicion is that very few of your users are clicking on those links. Google knows that footer links are rarely clicked, and scores of SEOs have abused this area in the past, and that's why Google tends to devalue any links placed there.
So even though in this case, the links there may provide some user benefit, Google most likely doesn't pass much link value through them, and may even devalue the anchor text text used, as these are site-wide footer links.
On the other hand, even those those links aren't helping you from an SEO perspective, they probably aren't hurting you very much either. You've chosen broad, partial-match anchor text, and the number of links seem within reason.
Food for thought: If the links are important to visitors, is the footer the best place for them? Perhaps if you found a more prominent location higher up in the navigation, you might see improved click-through rates, and you might even gain an SEO benefit from it.
Just something to think about.
-
Thanks, and yes people don't always make it that far down. I'm definitely going to add the terms of service and privacy policy on the bottom. Good points. Thanks again
-
Thanks Andrew, good stuff. Glad to know it's not of the spammy variety. The last update almost made it sound like any footer was a bad footer. Working on internal links now.
-
I think you may be thinking of the updates that says links in footers are bad now? Correct me if I'm wrong. I believe the intent of that is that site wide links in footers of other peoples sites that link to yours are devalued. This means that you won't be getting link juice from every page on their website like you would expect.
Links in your own footer should be for the benefit of your visitors first, and I think that's what you've done with your links. If you're trying to mold your PageRank in a specific way, try breadcrumbs or internal linking from the content of the page.
-
I don't see a problem with your Footer - I like it.
I do have, on the other hand a theory, as of why people might not be clicking on it (They don't scroll down enough). But a theory is a theory, so have you tried any Heat Map tool to analyze this - CrazyEgg for example?
On another note... you might consider (This is something I am doing with my own site, or at least I will this week ) to add some no-follow attributes to those links... which ones? The ones that you would in fact consider adding them to (if you think twice about it maybe you should add the attribute to it).
Also you might want to think about having a 'Privacy Policy' and/or 'Term of Use' links there... Those are good signals that you are a legitimate website... not to mention Ad Center will not let you (or at least that's what their policies state) advertise with them if these are not present and/or accessible from your Home Page.
Just my thoughts....
Daniel
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
-
Bad Backlinks to my website. Rankings Dropped
Hi guys, My name is Flavius and I work for a website named LaserPRocessing.ro from Romania. In april this year the site was infected with a virus and got around 1k bad backlinks. I found those backlinks on Moz Backlinks Tools. I added them on GSC disawow file. What next steps do you recommend to tell Google to block those links? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nojaflaviusalex0 -
Rank Loss Analysis Tool
I did a detailed analysis of the loss in rankings for about 100 pages on my site over the last 6 months. For few pages the SEO clicks have dropped by 40%. This is not due to algorithm penalty but one of the following reason Competitor with a higher DA created a similar article Existing Competitors get more backlinks Search volume itself is down - (Don't care) Loss in long tail traffic can you guys recommend a system to automatically track this and make a report? Also what would be corrective action in case of reason 1 and 4
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Janki990 -
Site rankings down
Our site is over 10 years old and has consistently ranked highly in google.co.uk for over 100 key phrases. Until the middle of April, we were 7th for 'nuts and bolts' and 5th for 'bolts and nuts' - we have been around these positions for 5-6 years easily now. Our rankings dropped mid-April, but now (presumably as a result of Penguin 2.0), we've seen larger decreases across the board. We are now 5th page on 'nuts and bolts', and second page on 'bolts and nuts'. Can anyone please shed any light on this? Although we'd fallen some before Penguin 2.0, we've fallen quite a bit further since. So I'm wondering if it's that. We do still rank well on our more specialised terms though - 'imperial bolts', 'bsw bolts', 'bsf bolts', we're still top 5. We've lost out with the more generic terms. In the past we did a bit of (relevant) blog commenting and obtained some business directory links, before realising the gain was tiny if at all. Are those likely to be the issue? I'm guessing so. It's hard to know which to get rid of though! Now, I use social media sparingly, just Facebook, Twitter and G+. The only linkbuilding I do now is by sending polite emails to people who run classic car clubs that would use our bolts, stuff like that. I've had a decent response from that, and a few have become customers directly. Here's our link profile if anyone would be kind enough as to have a look: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com Also, SEOMOZ says we have too many links on our homepage (107) - the dropdown navigation is the culprit here. Should I simply get rid of the dropdown and take users to the categories? Any advice here would be appreciated before I make changes! If anyone wants to take a look at the site, the URL is in the link profile above - I'm terrified of posting links anywhere now! Thanks for your time, and I'd be very grateful for any advice. Best Regards, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenshone1 -
What next to help with my rankings
I'm after a fresh set of eyes and any suggestions to help me with my site on what next I should be doing to help increase rankings. The site is: http://bit.ly/VR6xIm Currently the site is ranking around 9-11th on google.co.uk for it's main term which is the name of the site. The site is around a year old, when it launched it went initially up towards positions 3-5 but has since settled at around where it is now. I have a free tool webmasters can use to implement our speed test into their sites which also includes a link back to our site in it to recognise that we are providing the tool for free, I periodically change the link achor text so it is not always the same anchor text that every site uses. Is there anything obvious I should be doing or that is missing that would help with my rankings? *Just as a note, I am not after a review on the actual speed test on the site, a new one will be developed to help further increase accuracy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wardy0 -
Competitve keyword ranks on mobile but not on laptop
When i search for a very competitve keyword on a smart phone , my site ranks #6 but on laptop or desktop ranks #24. I do not have a mobile verison of my site just to clarify it. I have cleared the cache on my mobile and laptop. still the same. What is the reason for this?, I d appreciate an insight on this thanks. Nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | orion680 -
Should I remove footer links?
I added footer links to my site some months ago as I figured that any authority my home page had would be distributed to several of my other most important pages on my site helping them to rank. Would I be better to remove them and would that improve the authority of my home page as less 'link juice' is being distributed. I did originally set up a page per keyword on my site and start building links to each one but as my home page has a good authority I am going to target several keywords on my home page instead as I have some way to go to improve the authority of my other important pages and think this would be a better solution. It would reduce the number of links I have per page however I did see Matt Cutts say that the no more than 100 links per page rule doesn't apply any more. Do footer links add any SEo value?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
How long for new pages to rank
Hi Guys, Our website has some really good serps for our established keyword phrases some of which are quite competitive. We recently acquired and have begun selling some new brands through our online shop and launched new pages for these brands around 2 months ago. They are quite competitive ("merrell shoes" and "timberland boots" for example in google.co.uk) terms. Do you think we should get some keyword rich links built into these new pages from external sites such as blogs - or is there chances of ranking well driven more off our overall site authority/link profile? In other peoples experience, what is a typical realistic timeframe to start getting meaningful serps on new pages/keyword phrases (I know that is hard to answer - but ball parks figures appreciated). Thank you everyone in advance. Kind Regards (and happy thanksgiving to our US friends)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ConradC
Conrad Cranfield0 -
Strange Ranking Fluctuation - Some Predictions?
My client is the green line currently on 3 & 4. The pages that rank 3 & 4 are 3 -> home page targeted to main keyword 4 -> specific service page targeting same main keyword as home page (a bit of cannibalization) The competitor targets other keyword as their main keyword. The 1 & 2 position is taken by him but with 2 different sites (2 sites -> 1 owner). They have a high pa & da but is from gaming websites and stuff while my client has targeted good links. Any predictions... would the green go back again ? 🙂 IuVio.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mosaicpro0