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.
Do we have too many links in our footer?
-
Hi guys, we have 41 links on our holiday(vacation) rental website, this seems too many when looking at best practice. 24 of these are links to community pages while 8 link to activities pages. The community and activity pages are also accessible from links on the top menu so they are not strictly necessary but do get 10% of site clickthroughs according to Google in-page analytics. I therefore do not want to remove the links if there is no good evidence that google will penalize us for this. What do you think would be best for our site? Thanks, John Tulley.
-
Hi,
Yes the footer links are sitewide.
** Then I am sure those are not all 100% relevant for every page and you are spliting the Page Rank juice / equity / votes to all of the pages linked for all pages.
I would suggest to keep in the footer:
-
links that user can actually click on and links to releveant pages vs the pages they are placed on
-
links that are not in the page (menu, body, side bars etc)
Yes all the links (apart from the corporate links are duplicated in the menubar under the page header.
** They it will make sense to keep there only the ones that are really important not all of them. And again, like stated above, you are spliting the votes to all links per page no matter what if the links are duplicated or not. More then that the anchor text of the footer links won't matter anyway as only the first one is taken in consideration and since the other are above those will be considered.
-
-
I'd be wary of that community page, however it's extremely unlikely that one page will have a negative impact across the whole website, so it's not a high priority
As mentioned below, reducing the footer on internal pages might be an option?
-
Hi eyepaq,
Thanks for the reply,
Yes the footer links are sitewide.
Yes all the links (apart from the corporate links are duplicated in the menubar under the page header.
Do you then recommend just having the corporate links in the footer?
-
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the reply, most of our property pages have between 110 and 140 links per page. Our community pages may be a problem as they list each property on a community and for each property there is 5 image links and 2 text links. One community page lists 28 properties and that page has a total of 305 links.
-
Hi,
For sure you won't get a penalty for having too many links in the footer. More then that you don't have that many anyway.
Is this footer site wide ? ( on all pages of the site ). A good idea is to have a more heavy footer on the home page only and have a more dedicated version on the inner pages.
Are those link also available in the body of the page / pages since you do have some clicks on those but GA shows the links CTR overall not per individual links so that means maybe the users are not actually clicking on the links in the fotter if those are also available in the header, body side bars etc.
If yes, that will "harm" you in the way that you split all internal link equity to all links per page including those in the footer - so as far as structure is not really a good idea as I am sure some pages that are linked from your pages - all around - including the footer are more important then others but you are actually diluting those "votes" by having that many links per page all around.
Again, the bottom line is that there is no way you will get a penalty but:
-
google might not follow all links if you don't have enough authority
-
some of your important pages won't get the needed "attention" due to the fact that you are linking to that many pages from all pages of your site.
-
-
John,
41 links for a footer area, whilst it is a large number, isn't too many really. You should be careful on the total number of links on the page however. I believe you should try to cap it at 100, but I think I've read somewhere 200+ is classed excessive
Hope this helps!
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
-
Do a bunch of footer internal links help or hurt?
We are an ecommerce site... In days gone by, having a bunch of footer links with your top products / categories was a good idea - as it created a ton of internal links to these products. Now, I am hearing that those links "dilute" the value of our other links on a page - and essentially, there is more harm than good from these. Does anyone know what I am talking about (the olds days) and should we still be doing this? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Ted_Cullen0 -
Duplicate anchor text vs poor relevance in internal links
We're writing a number of blog posts, all based around a particular head-term (call it "women's widgets"). Each post will be centered around a different long-tail keyword (e.g. "women's brandA widgets", "women's brandB widgets", "women's type1 widgets", etc.). We want to link from the blog posts back to the main "women's widgets" category-level page on our site. Should we: a) Use the words "women's widgets" in each blog post and link that to the "women's widgets" page? This would be the most relevant, but it also seems like using the same anchor text on all of the posts, and linking to the main page, is not good since Google doesn't like seeing the same exact anchor text all the time, right? b) Link the long-tail keyword ("women's brandA widgets") to the main "women's widgets" page? That would solve the anchor text duplication issue, but then the anchor text doesn't seem relevant to the page being linked to (it might never mention "brandA" on that main page at all), and I think it would also hurt the blog post's chances of ranking for the long-tail keyword since we're basically saying that there's a more relevant page for that keyword somewhere else (i.e. you shouldn't link out from a page using the phrase you're trying to optimize that page for). c) Link a nearby word/phrase instead? For example, we could say "Trust Companyname.com for your women's widget needs", and link "Companyname.com" to the "women's widget" page. By proximity to the keyword phrase, that may help a bit, but again the relevancy of the anchor text to the page being linked to is fairly low. I'd hate to have a bunch of "click here", "read this" or "company name" anchor texts being used, just in the name of not overusing the head-term in the anchor text. Are we just missing something, or misunderstanding Google's preferences? What do you do when you don't want to overuse a keyword in anchor text, but you still want to link to a main category-level page using the head-term in order to tell Google that that is the most relevant, best page for that keyword? Is anchor text duplication more of a problem for external backlinks, and less of an issue for internal interlinking? Do you have a different suggestion, other than what I outlined above? Thanks for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | BandLeader
John0 -
Is it bad to include google Maps in footer?
We have 5 locations and we were thinking about including a map for each location in the footer. These would be set-up as no-follow links. They could potentially enhance user experience but it also increases size of footer. Right now there are just basic links to pages (sitemap, terms, etc), contact info, social links, and contact form. If we did the maps it would also include link to the individual location pages. Not sure if we are doing too much in footer or need to just keep it basic. Thanks for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | Restore0 -
Best way to nofollow affiliate links?
I don't "nofollow" affiliate links but I have quite a few. Doing them one by one would just be an impossible job. Would it be best to get a plugin that nofollows EVERYTHING? What would google prefer? I need to DOFOLLOW some links because those sites deserve it.
On-Page Optimization | | 2bloggers0 -
What is the best setup for conical Links
Should I have the conical link state: 1. www.autoinsurancefremontca.com 2. www.autoinsurancefremontca.com/index.html 3. autoinsurancefremontca.com Also do you need a conical link on each page if you have more than one page on your site?
On-Page Optimization | | Greenpeak0 -
Footer copyright year statement. good or bad
Hi, I see a lot of sites with a year copyright statment in the footer like Copyright 2011 - DomainName.com or Copyright 2002 - 2012 - Domainname.com since new year a lot of sites (founded before 2011) still have 2011 instead of 2012 in the footer. Do you think the date gives any signals to google? Should someone update the date or remove it completely? I would tend to remove it completely since the page date for google is submitted in the HTTP header. But maybe the info could be of any use for the user. Any best practices?
On-Page Optimization | | Autoschieber0 -
Footer link to home page?
Quick question - is it a best practice to add a footer link on each page of a website that points back to your home page, with the anchor text being your official brand name?
On-Page Optimization | | Bandicoot0 -
Prevent link juice to flow on low-value pages
Hello there! Most of the websites have links to low-value pages in their main navigation (header or footer)... thus, available through every other pages. I especially think about "Conditions of Use" or "Privacy Notice" pages, which have no value for SEO. What I would like, is to prevent link juice to flow into those pages... but still keep the links for visitors. What is the best way to achieve this? Put a rel="nofollow" attribute on those links? Put a "robots" meta tag containing "noindex,nofollow" on those pages? Put a "Disallow" for those pages in a "robots.txt" file? Use efficient Javascript links? (that crawlers won't be able to follow)
On-Page Optimization | | jonigunneweg0