News Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com
Published: Sep 18, 2008 - 04:24 am
Story Found By: DavidWallace 1242 Days ago
Category: Usability
So now instead of optimizing the footer with links, most webmasters rightfully focus on both making it useful and avoiding any chance of being blamed for breaking any rules. So what to include in the footer? Let’s first see how other smart people handle this."
7 Comments
Comments
A lot of designers use the footer to link back to themselves, which is fair of course, but then they are unrelated.. then again we have these sponsored wp themes that a lot of bloggers use which again have a lot of unrelated links.. and we have plugins like say Spam Karma or Askimet which many people link to from their footer.. technically all these are usually not related to what the content on the site is about..Now what can someone do about this, maybe not use sponsored themes (which were rejected by the themes community anyway) ..but what about other genuine appreciation links? Or are these fine to keep..?
Agree with Ann’s comment about concentrating on users, but the statement "SEO value of the footer is too insignificant anyway" is verifiably false.NOFOLLOW the footer links to certain pages (eg, typically non-money pages like contact forms, T+Cs, privacy) and their rankings drop (assuming they are not widely linked elsewhere).Plus one would assume that Google use on-site footer links as a heavy cue for generating Site Links for the SERPs.
Is it true that search engines look down on external links in the footer? I’ve never heard of that.
Based on anectodal evidence the SEO value of footer links vary from site to site.In some cases, footer links most definitely pass link/anchor text weight to key interior pages. On the flip side, I’ve seen sites with footer links that are completely devalued and won’t even help an interior page get indexed.My advice: optimize the global footer links/anchor text as best you can without sacrificing usability. In most cases, those optimized footer links will pass some SEO value onto interior pages without upsetting your user experience.
I think it’s all about user experiance on this one. We usualy have simple navigation in the footer of sites that we build but for our largest website we decided to change it. As national franchise website it has a multitude listings in a variety of cities and suburbs. This makes it a little difficult to have a standard footer all the way through. We decided to change it up a little and include related refined search links in the footer. Now if someone searches for a city the suburbs with the highest number of listings make up the footer. While not perfect this has helped visitors to no end and has certainly increased the speed with which the listings themselves are indexed. As each listing is optimised for the long tail this has proven to be quite successful. I wouldn’t recomend doing this with a small site with just a few pages though.
That’s very sound advice, Ann. However I’ve gone in the completely opposite direction with my footers. I’ve given visitors a screenful. It’s explained in a post on Foolish Footers.
"Site-wide External links from the footer" was the thing I was researching when I ran across this post - I think most have realized that those footer links have far less value than they used to. many corporate sites have stopped using their footer to link to their portfolio of properties. but there are also those who are morphing the technique to target keyword phrases. Take a look at the new CNET footer for an extreme example of that. Targeting such competitive phrases from the footer seem almost foolish - but I’d be interested to know if it’s working for them.