Hi, I was wondering how sitewide links affect on-page SEO? By sitewide links I mean those links in the footer like Privacy policy, Contact, FAQ and stuff like that. Is it better to have those only on the homepage, or it's good that they are sitewide?
I assume that is recoomeded by SE instead. I do not know about other SE but I'm certain Google is the one which accept that.
My biggest site has about 25 major products that we promote. My global navigation has about 7 of the most profitable products as navigation menu items... In the footer I link to all 25 major product pages with the link text I want them to rank for, including linking to the same most profitable 7 products again that appear in the global navigation. However, for those 7 repeated links I use different link text in the footer. So those 7 most important product pages get passed 2x as much PR (double the PR) as the other 18 or so product pages and they get double the inbound links with varied link text on the inbound links to those 7 pages. Using footer links in this manner is a very effective way to control the flow of PR around your site AND to provide the search engines w/ strong clues as to which pages are most important to be indexed (and in Google's case to possibly influence which pages show up as sitelinks). And they add to the usability of the site because users who have scrolled to the bottom of a page don't have to scroll back up to the top to navigate to a different page. As for contact us, about us, privacy policy, etc. pages... having them in the footer of every page isn't going to really hurt you from an SEO perspective. Yes it's an extra 5 or so outbound links on every page, but most commercial sites have 100-200+ links per page anyway. So removing 5 links from a page w/ 100 outbound links means that the PR passed to each of the remaining links goes from ~1/100th of the PR of that page to ~1/95th of the PR of that page... in other words, from 0.0100*PR(page) to 0.0105*PR(page). Wow... you gained 5/100ths of 1% on each outbound link. Not a lot... IMO the usability gains of having them on every page typically FAR outweigh the SEO gains of removing the links from all pages except the home page. I think this is one example of where you go with usability over SEO. People looking for those pages are going to look in the header or footer of the page they're on. They aren't going to want to hunt all over the site to discover the links ONLY appear on the home page.