Links at bottom of page for SEO

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by Slimple74, Jul 7, 2009.

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  1. #1
    Hi there,

    I have a quick question. Basically I am building up a number of anchor text links at the bottom of my site. The links take people into deeper pages of the website.

    That way the navigation path is www.mydomain.com/whatever.html

    I was just wondering if there is any harm/benefit in this.

    Is it ok to build up a number of anchor text links at the bottom of my website.

    Or is it dangerous from an SEO point of view?

    Thanks
    :D
     
    Slimple74, Jul 7, 2009 IP
  2. Canonical

    Canonical Well-Known Member

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    #2
    Having footer links is very common. Some will argue that the fact that they are at the bottom of the page (or part of the templated part of you page) means that they carry less weight. But you're not going to get penalized or anything for linking to other parts of your site in your footer.

    My main navigation across the top of my site's pages only has like 8 links in it to the most important 8 pages on the site. But my footer has links to those same 8 pages as the top navigation (with slightly different link text) plus an additional 15 or so links to other major sections of the site that I could not fit into the top navigation. This is very common.
     
    Canonical, Jul 7, 2009 IP
  3. vansterdam

    vansterdam Notable Member

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    #3
    No this is a very common practice. Often times people cannot fit their entire link anchor text in their main navigation bar. So they have alternate navigation towards the bottom of the page using the full anchor text.

    There is no harm in doing this, unless you go about it wrong. For one, you will still want to limit the number of links per page to under 50-100. The less links you have per page, the more weight that is given to each one. If you have too many, your PR gets spread too thin and some pages might not even get properly crawled.

    Also try to make sure it doesn't look too spammy visually. If you overdo this, it could result in some kind of spam penalty.

    Doing this will help improve the rankings of each linked page. Search engines like when you use good internal link anchor text within your site. It makes their job easier.
     
    vansterdam, Jul 7, 2009 IP
  4. howling-hawk

    howling-hawk Peon

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    #4
    Doesn't harm nor benifit you in terms of SEO.

    -Howlinghawk
     
    howling-hawk, Jul 7, 2009 IP
  5. aliester

    aliester Peon

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    #5
    I still provide bottom-of-the-page links on many of my sites. Most actually.Of course I've always done that a bit differently than most in the SEO field. Almost everybody else seems to load up the bottom of the page with links to all sorts of ancillary pages in an attempt to get the spiders to consider those pages as being more important, being linked to from the home page.
     
    aliester, Jul 7, 2009 IP
  6. ColeenB

    ColeenB Peon

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    #6
    I've found internal linking to be very beneficial. However, you need to put it on the page in a way that will be useful to a human visitor. Maybe write a paragraph including your keywords, which you can link to internal pages. If you just have a bunch of links at the bottom, it will look unnatural to the search engines.
     
    ColeenB, Jul 7, 2009 IP