You may have seen websites with a long list of links in the footer. You may have them on your website too. Footer links can be used for a variety of purposes from additional navigation (to link to less important pages on your website) to boosting your SEO efforts. In the article we’ll look at the different types of footer links we’ve come across and whether they are good or potentially harmful to your search engine rankings.
It’s important to note that if you’re thinking about using footer links (also referred to as site-wide links or boilerplate links) as an SEO strategy, research suggests they have less of an impact than other types of links such as those within the content of your website.
It’s also interesting to note that a link’s visibility plays a part in how much value Google attributes to it. So if you have links in the footer with small text, these will have less value than links at the same font size of the main content of your website.
Submenu-style navigation links
The footer of your website is a great place to link to sub-pages, or pages with less importance. For example, your terms & conditions, about us page, refund & returns policy, privacy/data protection policy and a sitemap.
These have less value than main navigation links so make sure you’re not hiding any key pages in these footer links.
Keyword-rich footer links for SEO
We’ve seen footer links used a lot to list all the services or service locations a company has. It seems like an obviously strategy if you want to rank for what you do in every location you do it in, but is it a good idea?
An example would be if you are a plumber and you what to come up in search results when someone searches for “plumber in Leeds”, “plumber in Harrogate” and “plumber in York”. You might find that you only rank for the town where you are based and you lose out to other more local plumbers in other towns and cities, so you decide to create pages for each town and link to them in your footer. The result is a footer section which reads something like this:
Plumber in Leeds
Plumber in Harrogate
Plumber in York
Plumber in Wetherby
Plumber in Otley
Plumber in Ilkley
Plumber in Yeadon
Plumber in Bramham
Plumber in Headingley
The problem with this strategy is that it looks odd from a user’s perspective and doesn’t add any value to their visit, therefore it could also be saying to Google that these links are only here for SEO purposes, leaving you at risk of them being ignored (or worse!).
You might also be tempted to adopt a similar strategy to list all of your services and variations of them in your footer too, but having lots of keywords in the anchor text and repeatedly linking to the same pages from every page of your site is not such a great idea. Although there’s no known penalty, research has shown that Google devalues these links. Probably because they’re a deliberate attempt to manipulate search results and not helpful to the user.
Links to the website designer
Most web design agencies will add a link in the footer of your website to claim they built the website. It’s a like an advert for their services that appears on every page on every site they build. Essentially there’s nothing wrong with this if you’re the website owner, however, if you’re the website agency, you might want to consider the anchor text.
From an SEO point of view, you probably know that anchor text is important so you could be linking back to your site with something like “Web Design Leeds”. If you do this on every client’s site you’ll have lots of links pointing to your site with the same keyword-rich anchor text. This can be a red flag for Google as it doesn’t look natural.
Instead, think of these links as a way to drive traffic to your website (not for SEO purposes). When we think this way, we’re more likely to think like a user and link your company name (as the user doesn’t care about the anchor text so much). This would look much more natural to Google and less like you’re trying to game the system.
To follow or not to follow
If you’re concerned your footer links do look suspicious, or you’ve seen a drop in ranking after adding more links to your footer section, you may want to consider adding rel=”nofollow” to links that are not as important to you when it comes to ranking in search results.
This is also useful if you have any external links in your footer to sites that you don’t necessarily want to benefit from an SEO perspective.
In conclusion…
Google will always try to ascertain whether the footer links on your website are useful for the user (i.e. navigational links) or are simply there for SEO purposes. If Google suspects your links are just for SEO, there’s a good chance you’re wasting your time with this strategy as Google will likely ignore or devalue those links. Remember to ask yourself, “would I be doing this if search engines didn’t exist?”. If the answer is no, it’s probably not a good strategy.
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