Should I remove footer links?

[SamCUK]

I added footer links to my site some months ago as I figured that any authority my home page had would be distributed to several of my other most important pages on my site helping them to rank. Would I be better to remove them and would that improve the authority of my home page as less 'link juice' is being distributed.

I did originally set up a page per keyword on my site and start building links to each one but as my home page has a good authority I am going to target several keywords on my home page instead as I have some way to go to improve the authority of my other important pages and think this would be a better solution.

It would reduce the number of links I have per page however I did see Matt Cutts say that the no more than 100 links per page rule doesn't apply any more. Do footer links add any SEo value?

[Vahe.Arabian]

Hi Samuel,

Typically the footer is one of the most accessible components of a website, but search crawlers typically crawl this section last.

Whether or not you should have a site footer really depends on your sites navigation and how accessible your most important pages are. If it is SEO friendly, then simply put links to the HTML sitemap page and the most recent blog post/news links. However if it isn't then you should add footer links to your most important pages.

You can still use Matt Cutt's guideline as a general rule of thumb, You could also use Danny Dover's analogy of the anthill in his book.

Samuel finally each page is considered as a home page in search engines, with each having equal opportunity for ranking. You shouldn't only focus only on the home page is considered more generic than other page. You could potenitally impact the number of people clicking through to your site. Hence each page should be priortised, but have equal focus.'

Regards,

• V

[EGOL]

If those pages listed in the footer are really important then I would feature them on the homepage with a nice juicy image and enthusiastic description.

Nobody looks at links in the footer.  If these pages merit attention then give it to them properly.