At the bottom of my homepage, I have a "quick forum link" section. It has direct links to the top forums on my website with a few words to describe what it consist of. I figure this will help new people to the website to understand more what it consists of and help people find it through the search engines. The Order of Men http://www.orderofmen.com Links are at the bottom of the page.
I doubt it, but you probably could be penalized for the "web directories" onewaytextlink in the footer.
thanks for pointing that out to me, I just took it out. Did that awhile ago and it turned out over half of the directories weren't free anymore.
I think they won't help you as they are merely links to internal pages and are aimed at visitors to find more resources on your site. But links partners on left bar will definitely be a concern to Google as Google does not endorse either links exchange (reciprocal links) or paid links. But it will still be OK if you put rel="no follow" tags on them.
I don´t see any problem with that. You can point to every page of your website everywhere you like. Also I do not see any issue if you link to other websites either. I have in my footer links to all my other websites and I never had any problem with that. The idea of internet is, you can link to other pages around the world. And if you cannot do that then we can forget World Wide Web. ameran
wait now I'm confused, why would I put rel="no follow" on people's links I've exchanged with? Wouldn't this keep them from gaining anything from the link exchange (increased pagerank). If it is so bad for google, why does everyone exchange links to get their page rank up?
It's a myth that Google penalizes sites for linkexchange. But yes, they state in their TOS "excessive link exchange can hurt your site". (Whatever excessive means, my link exchanges lead to the presumption that the nºs have to be really big and site themes "unrelated" to trigger some kind of filter or penalization).