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.
Service Location links in footer and on the service page - spamming or good practice?
-
We are are a managed IT services business so we try and target people searching for IT support in a number of key areas. We have created individual location pages (11) to localise our service in these specific areas.
We put these location links in the footer which went to the specified IT support pages respectively. Now we have created a general 'managed IT services' page and are thinking of linking to these specific pages on there as well as it makes sense to do it.
Would having these 11 links in the footer as well as on the 'managed IT services' page be spamming? or would it be good practice? If this is spamming, which linking location should hold preference.
Would appreciate the feedback
Thanks
Andy -
Thanks for the response Roman.
So the on-page internal links are a must and the footer links probably should be avoided.
This was my initial thought but i was swayed by our increase in rankings for some pages as well as a similar business who have done this method and rank highly in most support areas.
Gaining back links is next in our to do list!
Cheers
-
I definitely would not put these in the footer. Marie Haynes has a very good article on footer links that I normally reference: https://www.mariehaynes.com/footer-links-and-penalties/
Like Roman said, links in the footer don't offer much value anyway and put the site at risk for looking low-quality.
-
A link in the footer does not have the same value of a link in the body, check this article of Rand Fishkin about How Links in Headers, Footers, Content, and Navigation Can Impact SEO
Links in footers often get devalued
So if there's a link that you've got in your footer, but you don't have it in your primary navigation, whether that's on the side or the top, or in the content of the page, a link down here may not carry as much weight internally. In fact, sometimes it seems to carry almost no weight whatsoever other than just the indexing.
There's another good post about it Here is what Google says about footer links and penalties.
So what you can do?
Create 10 or 20 articles you can buy it or do it yourself, search for some blogs who accept guest post and submit your articles with this links to your site, so this links will give you traffic, relevance, and authority.
In summary, avoid footer links
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 rank a national home page for a local keyword phrase
Hello - We are a nationally available brand based in Denver, CO. Our home page currently ranks #8 (used to be 5) for "real estate photography in Denver" -- I want to improve this ranking, but our home page is generalized and not geared toward Denver, CO but to all of our markets. I'm trying to troubleshoot this and have a few ideas.... I would love advice on the best route, or a different route altogether: Create a Denver-specific page -- _will that page compete with my home page that is already ranked in the top ten? _ Add the keyword phrase in the image alt attribute Add keyword phrase into the content - need to make sure that viewers realize we are national I already updated the meta description to say "real estate photography in Denver and beyond"
Local Website Optimization | | virtuance_photography1 -
SEO Best Practice for Managing a Businesses NAP with Multiple Addresses
I have a client with multiple business addresses - 3 across 3 states, from an SEO perspective what would be the best approach for displaying a NAP on the website? So far I've read that its best: to get 3 GMB account to point to 3 location pages & use a local phone number as opposed to a 1300 number. Display all 3 locations in the footer, run of site
Local Website Optimization | | jasongmcmahon1 -
Differentiating Franchise Location Names to better optimize locations
Hello All, I am currently spear heading SEO for a national franchise. I am coming across locations in the same city and zip code. I'm definitely finding difficulties in naming the location in a way that will be specific to the franchise locations (locations are 1 mile away from each other). I am looking to apply geo specific location names for each center regardless of local city terms. (e.g. Apexnetwork of north madronna, Apexnetwork of south madronna) Also, building the website and location to read (apexnetwork.com/north-madronna….. apexnetwork.com/south-madronna) While encouraging the client to continue using the geo specific terms while writing blogs. Is this best practice? Any feedback would help.
Local Website Optimization | | Jeffvertus0 -
Service Area Location Pages vs. User Experience
I'm familiar with the SAB best practices outlined here. Here's my issue: Doing local landing pages as described here might not be ideal from a user experience point of view. Having a "Cities We Serve" or "Service Areas" link in the main navigation isn't necessarily valuable to the user when the city-specific landing pages are all places within a 15-mile radius of the SAB's headquarters. It would just look like the company did it for SEO. It wouldn't look natural. Seriously, it feels like best practices are totally at odds with user experience here. If I absolutely must create location pages for 10 or so municipalities within my client's service area, I'd rather NOT put the service areas as a primary navigation item. It is not useful to the user. Anyone who sees that the company provides services in the [name of city] metropolitan area will already understand that the company can service their town that is 5 miles away. It is self-evident. For example**, who would wonder whether a plumbing company with a Los Angeles address also services Beverly Hills?** It's just... silly. But the Moz guide says I've got to do those location pages! And that I've got to put them high up in the navigation! This is a problem because we've got to do local SEO, but we also have to provide an ideal experience. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | Greenery1 -
Suburb Pages
Hey Mozers, This is an old and often criticized method of SERP however we have a client who has requested we create suburb specific pages for their site. PLASTIC PLANTS "SUBURB" NEED PLASTIC PLANTS IN "SUBURB" They have shown us a competitor who is ranking for hundreds maybe thousands of suburbs in Australia using this method. Any thoughts or experience in this area would be appreciated.
Local Website Optimization | | wearehappymedia0 -
Advice on applying Service Area Schema
So I have client that delivers goods to residential addresses and commercial businesses. They have 60+ distribution centers but want to target surrounding counties, cities and territories. Our development team was considering using virtual location pages (thousands) for these service areas. I have lobbied against this out of concern that Google would label these "doorway" pages. These pages would not have full addresses. I want to develop a strategy to gain coverage in these surrounding delivery areas. I was told that applying https://schema.org/serviceArea might help. However will this truly bring in the necessary visibility? Would having only a few key select virtual locations suffice (along with Service Area schema)? Any advice on applying https://schema.org/serviceArea attributes would be much appreciated.
Local Website Optimization | | RosemaryB
Thanks0 -
Local Service pages guide?
There are a lots of Local landing pages guide on the internet. Is there any guide for Local service pages? How to create them, what to include?
Local Website Optimization | | Michael.Leonard0 -
How Google's Doorway Pages Update Affects Local SEO
Hey Awesome Local Folks! I thought I'd take a proactive stance and start a thread on the new doorway pages update from Google, as I feel there will be questions coming up about this here in the forum: Here's the update announcement: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html And here's the part that will make local business owners and Local SEOs take a second glance at this: Here are questions to ask of pages that could be seen as doorway pages: Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic? I think this will naturally lead to questions about the practice of creating local/city landing pages. At this point, my prediction is that this will come down to high quality vs. crummy quality pages of this type. In fact, after chatting briefly with Andrew Shotland, I'm leaning a bit toward seeing the above language as being strongly geared toward directory type sites and large franchises. I recommend reading Andrew's post about his take on this, as I think he's on the right track: http://www.localseoguide.com/googles-about-to-close-your-local-doorway-pages/ So, I'm feeling at this point that if you've made the right efforts to develop unique, high quality local landing pages, you should be good unless you are an accidental casualty of an over-zealous update. We'll see! If anyone has thoughts to contribute on this thread, I hope they will, and if lots of questions start coming up about this here in the community, feel free to link back to this thread in helping your fellow community members 🙂 Thanks, all!
Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis9