Footer Content

[NeilD]

We currently have footer content contained in a single php include file and is included in every page and contains the following:

• Most recent 3 tweets from our twitter feed

• Snippets of our 3 most recent blogs posts

• navigation links to our main pages (essentially the same as our main navigation in the header)

Is this good/bad?

[MarkScully]

Can you offer a link to your website Neil so we can see whether the use of links in the footer is excessive?

If the content in the footer can be justified for navigational purposes from Google's perspective, then you should be fine.

[NeilD]

Thanks for your response Mark, I should have mentioned that the is still in development so not a lot to see. We are having a review of the design and the footer came into question with regards to SEO concerns.

We are thinking now about replacing the footer nav links with a newsletter signup box in that area plus a link to the site's sitemap.

My main point for discussion is really around the repeated elements of the footer such as the tweets and blog snippets.

From your comments are you saying this repeated content should be ok?

[MarkScully]

I think you need to look at it from two perspectives.

Is it really needed? Does every page of the site really need this content displayed on it? I would be hesitant about recommending you putting all these things into the footer of every page.

Secondly, Twitter feeds can slow page load time. This will impact on the bounce rate of your site and since site speed can impact ranking, you really gotta ask yourself again about the need for this on every page.

A couple of footer navigational links are fine. Just avoid stuffing the footer with Twitter, newsletter, navigational and blog post links.

[NeilD]

Thanks again Mark, good point about Twitter load times something I had overlooked. I think we just need to more creative about footer elements perhaps, maybe we are over thinking that area of the website!

[MarkScully]

No problem Neil - Just focus on the end user and the decisions should be easy to make in regards the footer etc.

I mentioned page load time issues with Twitter because of experience I've had. It's always been 3rd party content which has resulted in site speed issues.

Social media feeds/widgets are just sometimes not worth the issues they can cause.

[NeilD]

Yeah, I also think there is an element in the thought process of "well every other site puts links, newsletters etc in the footer" so why shouldn't we, however reading some other threads on footer links elsewhere it would seem the concensus is "are people actually clicking on the links" in the footer anyway and if not, why have them.