It has been recommended that we remove the number of links in our footer, should we?
-
We have a pretty user friendly footer with almost an entire site-map on it. It's similar to many e-commerce company footers, and I think it's useful to the user.
SEO professionals have recommended that to reduce the number of links on any given page on our site we should compress our footer and only show the headers, thus removing many links.
This in my opinion is a disservice to the user and makes the site not look as good, but maybe it's a good idea for SEO to get rid of so many links per page?
What do you think?
(pic attached)
-
This was just mentioned in Rand's white board video, tip #3. The only thing is it conflicts with SEOmoz's linking, as they have about 20 links on the footer. Are they there because they are getting clicked on?
I'm pretty sure nobody clicks on my footer links and am in the process of removing them and adding customized side navigations on specific pages to add a better navigational structure.
To SEOmoz, why so many footer links on SEOmoz if it's a 2012 no, no?
Note: Must be logged out to see footer links.
-
@Aran: Did you find out if people actually clicked on those footer links? From the screenshot, the links don't look too bad and it's possible to keep an overview. So it would be interesting to know if people don't even click on a well-done footer...
-
I definitely agree that you should figure out if your footer links are adding value to your users. If they are, I'm not sure I'd blindly follow the "prune your links" philosophy. I note that Zappos.com seems to rank OK with a pretty link heavy footer. One size does not fit all.
-
There are a number of different ways in GA, Omniture, etc to track specific link clicks from places like the footer...many of which I'm not extremely well versed in, but the googles certainly know. I would definitely recommend doing that to get a pure numbers look at the situation.
I'd also though recommend you modify Will Critchlow's mturk method of grading content for a look at usability of the footer and/or use something like usertesting.com to get some qualitative feedback on the footer. Guaranteed you will get a look at your design that you've never even thought of, and the cost is so extremely low when you consider what you can get out of it.
-
Thanks Egol! I have looked at CrazyEgg in the past, and I will revisit them now.
-
Thanks Ryan - My challenge is getting actionable data on how useful the footer links are to users. How would you recommend using Google Analytics to accomplish this?
-
You are probably right, but by removing the subcategories for the other sections of the site (Guides, Blog) maybe lateral movement throughout the site will be reduced... is that reduced browsing worth the SEO benefit by the number of links removed?
-
Thanks Albin!
How would you get the most useful data on the footer links with Google Analytics? I use site overlay and it's not very accurate because site overlay just reports on the percent of people who click on a link on the page, regardless of location. I am not 100% certain as to how to get actionable data on the effectiveness of the footer.
It's a pretty labour intensive project redesigning and re-implementing a new footer so I want to make sure it's really worth it.
-
You are operating under the assumption that people are using those footer links.
Run a program like CrazyEgg to see if anyone is clicking those links.
I bet nobody clicks them.
-
Ryan, your absolutely right about the .xml-sitemap. The important is of course that the sitemap is reported to the search engines and therefore it's not mandatory to place it in the footer. (Should have thought of that...sorry)
-
I strongly agree with Albin and Joe. Check to see what your user's think. I'll take the user experience over a group of SEO experts. What do SEO's know?
Your footer links are very well presented and represent your site well. It is a best practice to minimize your links. If you discovered your links are not actually being used then the feedback from your users is basically those unused links are not helpful and you can consider removing them OR possibly altering the anchor text to something that users may find more helpful.
I will disagree with Albin about the sitemaps. I usually recommend an HTML sitemap but I would not recommend placing a link to a XML sitemap on your page. Offering two sitemaps to users does not make sense to me, and a HTML sitemap is clearly the more useful way to present a sitemap. In your case, I probably wouldn't offer a HTML sitemap either. You mentioned that you already offer links to almost all of the pages on your site. If the couple pages you do not offer links to are not very popular and you have other links to those pages, you may be better of as-is.
I have the impression many SEOs blindly follow certain "rules" such as eliminate footer links and always go xyz. It's important to view standards as guidelines which need to be flexible and adjusted for each site's needs.
-
Pruning links from page templates (header, footer, etc.) is generally a good idea if they don't go to important pages. As Albin suggests, listen to the data. What are users not clicking on?
I can see some of these as not being needed in the footer. If your store pages are used as navigation, these are redundant, unless users like using them in the footer. Pages like "returns" and "order tracking" probably aren't making you a lot of money, and can still be easily found from a customer service page that is linked to from the footer. This way users can still find what they need, but you only devote one link instead of four or five.
I don't think removing a handful of links from the footer will diminish the look of the site or the user experience significantly.
-
What does the statistics says about clicks on the links in the footer? Does users actually find the footer useful?
If there are some links in the footers that might be popular to the users, then keep them and erase the others. If you have 100+ links on your page, that's really bad. Keep the amount of links to a minimum and try to "listen" to the users by only having useful links in the footer. If you're using e.g. Analytics, it might be easy to check these stats.
Report these stats for me and I'll give you a quick analysis about which links to keep and which to get rid of.
Another follow-up question; Does your page has a link to a xml-sitemap AND a html-sitemap? If not, get it for best optimization
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
-
How Removing Zombie pages effect on domain authority?
Hi. Recently I got a project (removing zombie pages here: https://www.alamto.com/ ) As you can see this site has about 20k indexed page on google and it seems I should remove about 6000 useless indexed page. does removing (Noindex) these pages affect on the site metrics? Which metrics would affected? and how? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | jafarfahi1 -
Google Parsing jQuery Links as Real Links
While trying to diagnose a recent Google penalty I found out that links were being parsed by Google even though they were made using jQuery. I had the linkify plugin on my site and configured it to convert URLs to links on all of my pages. Today I found links to other sites of mine from sites that should not have been linking to them and found that the links came from pages whose links were generated via jQuery. This makes me wonder, how do I know if Google is counting javascript generated links? Is it possible that my native ad widgets are creating links that Google might count? Since I don't own any of the sites that advertise via the widgets I don't know how to tell if they are getting link juice or not. It used to be that Google didn't parse javascript, so you could add as many links to your site via javascript as you wanted without being seen by Google as linking to those sites. Does anyone know of a jQuery plugin that does turn URLs into clickable links that Google won't parse as real links?
On-Page Optimization | | STDCarriers0 -
Duplicate content from page links
So for the last month or so I have been going through fixing SEO content issues on our site. One of the biggest issues has been duplicate content with WHMCS. Some have been easy and other have been a nightmare trying to fix. Some of the duplicate content has been the login page when a page requires a login. For example knowledge base article that are only viewable by clients etc. Easily fixed for me as I dont really need them locked down like that. However pages like affiliate.php and pwreset.php that are only linked off of a page. I am unsure how to take care of these types. Here are some pages that are being listed as duplicate: Should this type of stuff be a 301 redirect to cart.php or would that break something. I am guessing that everything should point back to cart.php.
On-Page Optimization | | blueray
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...art.php?a=view
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...php?a=checkout These are the ones that are really weird to me. These are showing as duplicate content but pwreset is only a link of the KB category. It shows up as duplicate many times as does affilliate.php: https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...ebase/16/Email
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...16/pwreset.php Any help is overly welcome.0 -
Problem with internal links.
Hello,I am trying to do an audit of the internal links of my site at zenplugs.com. I am having great difficulty simply trying to establish how many internal links there are on the home page. Off the top of my head I think there are probably 20-25 but Screaming Frog tells me there are 574, the MozBar is listing zero and Open Site Explorer is telling me my site hasn't been indexed yet. I have tried several web based services but most of them don't work. Can anyone recommend a tool which has given them a number they trust? My second query is that one of the tools told me that there are 4 links on the home page with no anchor text, linking to http://zenplugs.com/#. Is this a problem? Many thanks, in advance. Toby
On-Page Optimization | | T0BY0 -
Footer and SEO
Hi All... We have a client who wants to really minimize and simply their website. They want to remove some of the footer info. Obviously we do not want to remove any contact or address but they would like to remove the footer menu system. I have read various things about it NOT effecting SEO and that it is there for user navigation and usability. Thoughts? Opinions? zach
On-Page Optimization | | Group20 -
Should I link my 3 E-Commerce sites?
Good Morning, I have 3 E-Commerce sites that all sell the same products, but have unique content on them (unique text, unique urls, same products).... Up until now, I have not put any links from one to any of the others... I just started to wonder about that since these are all related to the same industry, and are owned by 1 company, what would be the downside to linking them... Does anyone have any advice on if I should link to each site from the other 2 sites? Also, if you think I should be linking them, please advise how you would do it (on which pages, how many links, anchor texts, etc...) Thanks a lot!
On-Page Optimization | | Prime850 -
Apache Rewrite to remove page name extensions
If I use Apache Rewrite to remove my file extensions from my pages will Google view those pages as new? Do I have to also 301 redirect from the "page-name.htm" to "page-name"? I'd like to change my pages from html to php to make my life a little easier but I'm worried about losing link juice if I were to 301 on every page. Thanks -Brandon
On-Page Optimization | | TRICORSystems0 -
The Value of Internal Links?
I have seen countless SEO "experts" suggest internal links are great to help the search engines find your content. I wonder if that is true any more. It seems like a sitemap would do a better job. I think tags may even hurt the content I want to Google to know as most important. I'm using Simple Tags on all of my WP sites. If it "sees" a word in the article that is also a tag it adds a link for that tag to a listing of all the articles with that tag. It only does this once per tag though. Going on the experts advice, I thought this was a good idea. But now, I'm thinking these tags reduce the value of links to my eBook or other content i want to feature. Which doesn't get tagged much since I don't promote it all that often on my site within content. I make it nearly impossible to miss it on the site though. 🙂 What I do see the tags doing is helping users find the content. So I do see it improving the bounce rate and giving uses an assist in finding more content about what they are looking for. I have tags marked as noindex follow. But I'm really considering now removing the links. I hate plugins anyway. 🙂 Seems I'm always finding another must have plugin though. Now I'm thinking I'd be better off to just add links manually into the content that I really want to feature. All these automatic links I'm generating can't be good. Thanks for your thoughts on this.
On-Page Optimization | | RustyF0