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.
Best practice for footer in ecommerce - Shall I add Top Category links?
-
What would you recommend regarding links to "Top Products" and "Top Categories" in footer?
- Would you add them to give extra link juice to top categories?
- would you try to avoid category links in footer that are already in the header navigationor in the main content area to avoid linking twice from all pages?
- would you vary these top category links in footer according to main category
-
thanks for the feedback. Will stick to few dynamic footer category links and test it.
-
Takeshi gave some great advise, and I agree.
I do like the idea of varying the footer navigation by category though. For example, you might interlink Men's Shoes with Women's Shoes, but you wouldn't want to link to Women's Shoes from Men's Shirts. Keeping the footer from being site-wide and making the links more relevant to the page their on will, I think, allow those footer links to carry more weight than they would otherwise.
Whatever you choose, make sure it's best for your users. Do that and it's difficult to go wrong.
-
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of mega menus or mega footers. Every link on a page dilutes the value of every other link on the page, so keep the number of links per page as low as possible, while optimizing for usability.
-
I agree with Takeshi. You should put more emphasis on what users want.
However based on my experience, if you limit the URLs to say 4-5 you would see some benefits. However if you plan to put much more, I wouldn't so much advice it.
K
-
Links in the footer carry very little link value, so I wouldn't add top category links to the footer just for SEO purposes. Looks at it more from a design/user experience perspective. If having the links in the footer makes navigation easier, then go for it.
As with anything else, the best thing to do is to test it. Install a click tracker such a CrazyEgg or ClickTale and see how people actually navigate the site. Test having the links in the footer vs removing them, and see if it affects usability, conversions rates, or SEO performance. Then keep the links that work the best.
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
-
Schema Markup for eCommerce Category Pages?
My research indicates that applying an ItemList schema markup to our category pages is likely the best way to go. However, I've also ready that Google discourages schema markup on category pages. I'm just wondering if any of you have applied schema markup to your category pages and, if so, how did you do it? John,
On-Page Optimization | | JohnBrown75
Essay Writer1 -
Auto loading articles ?- best practices
Hi all! In the past months I see more and more website that doing 'auto loading articles in scrolling' - can you tell me if it's okay for SEO and what are the best practices for this? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | JohnPalmer1 -
How "Top" or "Best" are considered when in front of keyword
I would like to know if someone has proven info how google today counts words "Top" or "Best" when in front of main keywords you try to rank for. For example, if I have a keyword like "Restaurants in Madrid" and I optimize that page without using words "top" or "best" will it have good rankings for keywords "top restaurants in madrid" and "best restaurants in madrid" ? I suppose that google is smart enough to know that web page should be good ranked even without using those 2 words but would like to know percentage of my loss if I just exclude those words from title tag and other important onpage factors. I want to rank high for all the 3 combinations, with "top", with "best" and without it in front so searching for best solution. I plan just to add one of those words, for example "top" and hope that google will know that "top" = "best" 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | m2webs0 -
Handling multiple locations in the footer
I have a client with several locations. Should I include only the main office's address in the footer? The client is wanting to add them all.
On-Page Optimization | | SearchParty0 -
Best practice for Portfolio Links
I have a client with a really large project portfolio (over 500 project images), which causes their portfolio page to have well over the 100 links that are recommended. How can I reduce this without reducing the number of photos they can upload?
On-Page Optimization | | HochKaren0 -
Navigation Links Causing Too Many Links Help?
Hello, I have read some SEOMOZ search results for this, but am still concerned that Google may see 4,500 Too Many Link warnings as a problem. This is caused primarily due to our header navigation, which is not intended to be keyword stuffing, but to provide all avenues for our breadth of content. site: crazymikesapps.com. Most answers seem to advise if there is no keyword stuffing at hand don't worry about it. Any help appreciated. thank you Mike
On-Page Optimization | | crazymikesapps0 -
Too many links on page -- how to fix
We are getting reports that there are too many links on most of the pages in one of the sites we manage. Not just a few too many... 275 (versus <100 that is the target). The entire site is built with a very heavy global navigation, which contains a lot of links -- so while the users don't see all of that, Google does. Short of re-architecting the site, can you suggest ways to provide site navigation that don't violate this rule?
On-Page Optimization | | novellseo2 -
Avoiding "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" - Best Practices?
We have a website with a searchable database of recipes. You can search the database using an online form with dropdown options for: Course (starter, main, salad, etc)
On-Page Optimization | | smaavie
Cooking Method (fry, bake, boil, steam, etc)
Preparation Time (Under 30 min, 30min to 1 hour, Over 1 hour) Here are some examples of how URLs may look when searching for a recipe: find-a-recipe.php?course=starter
find-a-recipe.php?course=main&preperation-time=30min+to+1+hour
find-a-recipe.php?cooking-method=fry&preperation-time=over+1+hour There is also pagination of search results, so the URL could also have the variable "start", e.g. find-a-recipe.php?course=salad&start=30 There can be any combination of these variables, meaning there are hundreds of possible search results URL variations. This all works well on the site, however it gives multiple "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" errors when crawled by SEOmoz. I've seached online and found several possible solutions for this, such as: Setting canonical tag Adding these URL variables to Google Webmasters to tell Google to ignore them Change the Title tag in the head dynamically based on what URL variables are present However I am not sure which of these would be best. As far as I can tell the canonical tag should be used when you have the same page available at two seperate URLs, but this isn't the case here as the search results are always different. Adding these URL variables to Google webmasters won't fix the problem in other search engines, and will presumably continue to get these errors in our SEOmoz crawl reports. Changing the title tag each time can lead to very long title tags, and it doesn't address the problem of duplicate page content. I had hoped there would be a standard solution for problems like this, as I imagine others will have come across this before, but I cannot find the ideal solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Kind Regards5