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Static Links in Sidebar Hurting SEO?
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Our website currently has a sidebar/widget area that appears on almost all pages throughout of entire site (350 page domain). In that sidebar, we have some static links and some non-static links. Right now there are:
6 Related Post Links - Non-Static
1 - Call To Action - Static to a landing page
10 Calculators - Static - These calculators I think are very useful to our users (financial website).So in total 17 total sidebar links, 11 static links, and 6 which change based on the content of the page. Do you think these static links from an SEO perspective can be hurting us? Is there some sort of best practice for sidebar links in regards to quantity as well as static vs non-static?
Thanks!
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Tons of great advice here. My responsive design drops the sidebar to below 5% of the average scroll depth so I binned it and nothing bad happened to pages per session or time on site or bouncerate or any of the important user signals. I do have a site-wide 'BOOK AN EMERGENCY APPOINTMENT' button but people use it and we're killing it for emergencies. It's one of our best catagories and is hotly competitive. It's in red and replaced a trustpilot widget that was taking people off site.
One of the best decisions I ever made and I was tearing my hair out about site wide links messing with SEO but it didn't happen for us. All the google results were 'no it's SPAMMY' - but they are just a load of content creators jumping on a bandwagon, here in the Moz community, as you can see, things are more nuanced.
So if it's relevant and helpful keep it. Do you have Hotjar. Allows you to see what peope are clicking on.
SWL and footer links Is one of those where spammy sites use it so people say - "ooh don't ever use it" - but you must not be that binary. If it helps the users then keep it. In my case hardly anyone used them so I dropped them in favour of one important button.
But an additional bump in pageviews and time on site because people are navigating around your site is absolute gold. So you must encourage that. but remember Cialdini's jam experiment. More than three choices is going to induce decisional paralysis especially when you have only a second and the user is almost making unconscious decisions navigating. It's like driving. You're not thinking what you're doing - it's automatic. So make is fluid and easy and watch the user feedback signals.
How about "Learn more", "buy something" or 'back to navigation'
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That's the way a lot of people have their responsiveness configured. There are many who drop the sidebar. Others move elements of the sidebar into the content to make the options visible higher in the page.
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Yeah I was talking about desktop when talking about the sidebar, but in mobile it does move just below the main content and is still visible.
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When I hear the word "sidebar" these days, I think of a desktop site. I don't think of "sidebars" on a mobile site.
If you are talking "desktop" and you have a mobile version of your site, does that sidebar appear in any format on the mobile site? If not, your sidebar will not be an SEO consideration once Google and your site move to the mobile index. At that time you will lose any SEO benefit (or curse) that the sidebar added to the desktop version of your website.
This is the issue about the mobile first index that very few people are talking about and a lot of people havn't even thought about.
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