Hi All, What would you think Whether footer link does pass value in search engine rankings or not? Any ideas much appreciated.
Google has no separate algo to consider footer links or header links separately. So no question arises, what links are the best in search engine point of view. Every back link whether lying on header or footer passes the link value and helps in search engine rankings(if optimize properly)..
Of course it does pass, but one thing to be kept in mind is that the Google bot reads a page from the top left to the bottom right..so you can know the priority of yours links from this.
Well, we know that google sometimes doesn't index pages that are too long. But, are you saying that links appearing near the top have better value in the eyes of google than links appearing near the bottom?
When you do on-page SEO, the nearer keywords to the top, the better pages optimize. Thus, I think it the same for links.
In my experience, footer links do not pass much value. I sponsored a wordpress theme, and keyword ranking did not change much. How do you know this? It is easy for search engines to find footer links I think search engines do not attribute much value if there are too many footer links.
I have footer links on all my websites linking back to my main webdesign website and they seem to give good PR link juice to my main site. I think they're definitely worthwhile from my experience.
A footer or sidebar or header link, as long as the link is crawled and indexed in google, it is considered as a link by google. All it is count is the number of outgoing links from the particular page and the page's PR to give the quality of the backlink.
Google can find the footer links but since they are at the bottom of the page Google has decreased the value of them. If you are buying links you should ask for it in content somewhere anyways or on a sidebar that also has text involved. Remember that Google and other search engines also look at the text surrounding the anchor text even if it isn't linked.
In my experience Google is quite sophisticated when it assigns value to links on a page. I noticed several times that links that are isolated from the main block of text are not always counted by Google (not reported, for example, in Google Webmaster tools). There is absolutely no doubt that the most valuable links are close to the top of the page and, more importantly, part of a block of text. When you are creating a page for the purposes of linking to another page and giving it some "SEO juice", you should embed that link within a paragraph of highly relevant text. Google also knows that some people like to put links at the bottom of pages that are for search engines and not humans (very small fonts etc). For this reason Google tends to place less trust on footer links.
As far as my understanding goes, a link is a link and I doubt if google differentiates between them if they are placed on top part of the page or at the bottom. In my opinion, every link on a page counts. Regards, RightMan
There are numerous opinions on this, however I have yet to read a definitive answer on any Google page. There is great speculation out there that Google has started to, or is going to, devalue footer links.