Footers... Good or Bad?
-
I know in the past footers have been seen as a bad idea. I need to get up to date. Does having footer links that point to your own site with anchor texts keywords create problems? or is it safe to have?
Will it do anything to our google rankings? Is it going to penalize us? As well, how many is acceptable, do I want all 77 links or have 15 with sub-categories?
-
Hi Justin.
Footer links are read last as web crawlers read your page. Anchor text is associated with the first link that is found on a given page. This is important to know as links are often found in your navigation bar, side bars and content so the anchor text in the footer does not get applied.
Footer links are also devalued from a SEO point of view. They do not have the same weight as other links on the page. Search engines understand footer links are the least visible and least used links on a page. You should review some analytics to determine if any of your footer links are actually used.
It can be useful to offer a handful of footer links. Stuffing 30+ links in your footer is not helpful for SEO nor your users. Take a look at the SEOmoz footer links for a reasonable example.
In summary, you are not penalized for having many footer links unless they get to the point where they appear spammy. But you are algorithmically disadvantaged by adding any unnecessary links as you are taking away PR from flowing to the more important links 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
-
Embedded twitter post is good for https://www.fitness-china.com/hip-thrust-machine seo
We have short video posts on twitter. Embedded twitter post is good for https://www.fitness-china.com/hip-thrust-machine SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | ahislop5740 -
Having country in page url, good idea or bad idea?
Lets say i sell louisville hockey sticks if i have a page url as louisville-hockey-sticks-canada is this better than louisville-hockey-sticks I have a .CA domain
On-Page Optimization | | garmatinc0 -
Site wide content like "why choose us" just above the footer on every single page
Hi Guys, I know that is not good having any kind of duplicate content on your site, but SEO is above all "competition", so I have to see what my competitor are doing to find the best way to outrank them. So this is my question: is it good or not having site wide content like "why choose us" just above the footer on every single page? At the moment, I can see many - too many - of my client competitors having the "Why choose us" as site wide content above the footer. The funny thing they don't use a couple of sentences, they have placed many words and 10/20 internal links, in other words, they have enough stuff to put down a stand alone page. What do you think: this is just a bad SEO practice or it may work, as I can see so many sites ranking well with this kind of piece of junk on each page. I am not going to recommend this to my client, but as am trying to detail every decision I make showing what the competitors are currently doing, my concern is that my client finds it and therefore will ask to have the same shiny piece of garbage above the footer. Thanks, Pierpaolo
On-Page Optimization | | madcow780 -
Is a resource page bad for SEO
This is the page http://www.christoit.com/free-resources/articles. While this page isn't what I would consider to be a "resource page" (there are no downloads or any other resources) The question is, does a page like this that just has links to articles, hurt the overall ranking of the site. If you have any examples to support your opinion that would be great! Thanks so much for all awesome threads and answers on this site. There are some really smart people all in one place!
On-Page Optimization | | Britewave0 -
Is .PW domain is good for SEO?
I want to register .PW domain which has recently got live to register. I am in doubt should it is good for SEO or not.
On-Page Optimization | | semmediapvtltd0 -
Why do I hear that it can be a bad thing to have too many content pages?
My site has lots of long tail opportunity and so intention is to produce as much content as possible to target these keywords effectively. However, over the last 6 months I have come across numerous sources suggesting that Google can/does look down on a site having too many content pages. Is there any truth in this? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | Clicksjim0 -
Footer Content
We currently have footer content contained in a single php include file and is included in every page and contains the following: Most recent 3 tweets from our twitter feed Snippets of our 3 most recent blogs posts navigation links to our main pages (essentially the same as our main navigation in the header) Is this good/bad?
On-Page Optimization | | NeilD0 -
Redirecting to an exact match root domain: good, bad, or neutral?
We have a client who wants to secure an exact match domain for their new website, but it's very long. They're wondering about securing an additional domain that is much shorter for marketing purposes (business cards, email addresses, etc). We would then 301 redirect the short domain to the main domain. Are we going to see negative SEO implications from that?
On-Page Optimization | | MackenzieFogelson1