Footer Links And Link Juice

[Ubique]

I'm starting to learn about link juice and notice in GWMT > Traffic > Internal Links, that the list is in this order by the links counted on each page. Some are in the footer and some are in the header, with some being more important than others commercially i.e. /register

/privacy

/terms

/search

/sitemap

/disclaimer

/blog

/register

So I am wondering if I should add a 'no-follow' attribute to the footer links i.e. privacy, terms, disclaimer and leave the others as they are? Does this help retain link juice on each page where the links appear? Or am I missing the point all together?

This is my website: http://goo.gl/CN0e5

[OrionGroup]

You could add a noindex if you think the privacy and disclaimer pages, etc, are not bringing any SEO value. Nofollow would block search engines from even spidering them. But a noindex would just stop it from showing up as an entrance/landing page in the SERPs.

I wouldn't say that it helps "retain link juice", but it might help you to show the search engines what your most important pages are.

An alternative would be to perhaps only link to some of those pages from your home page and not from every single page. Are there any pages that you think would be appropriate NOT to link to all those pages? If so, perhaps you can write a conditional statement in your code to only show those links on some pages and not others.

Scott O.

[StevenHowe]

Hi there,

John Doherty did a really good whiteboard friday on this last year:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday

[irvingw]

No this won't work. it's called pagerank sculpting and used to work but Google fixed that a couple of years ago by making the nofollow counts as a link and instead all you are doing is throwing away your page juice.

[sprynewmedia]

A no-follow, in terms of juice, would actually hurt your goals as the link still gets allocated the juice portion but it doesn't flow through.  **Each no-follow link will siphon off a little juice. **

See http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

The effects of navigational links are diminished somewhat as Google treats them differently compared to content links.  To help solidify this, surround the footer with

<nav></nav>

tags.

Review: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links #5

Generally, remove any site wide links that aren't always needed and place them on page where users would like the details.  For instance, use a search form instead of a link to the search page.

[Dr-Pete]

Just to add to the consensus (although credit goes to multiple people on the thread) - PR-sculpting with nofollow on internal links no longer works, and it can be counter-productive. If these links are needed for users, don't worry about them, and don't disrupt PR flow through your site. Ultimately, you're only talking about a few pages, and @sprynewmedia is right - Google probably discounts footer links even internally (although we may no good way to measure this).

Be careful with links like "register", though, because sometimes they spin off URL variations, and you don't want those all indexed. In that case, you'd probably want to NOINDEX the target page - it just doesn't have any search value. I'm not seeing that link in your footer, though, so I'm not clear on what it does. I see this a lot with "login" links.

[Ubique]

Thanks for the link, this video answered a few of my niggles about footer links!

[Ubique]

Hmmmm.... a search form has been on my mind as I would track what people enter and then include them in my keyword research. Top tip!!

[Ubique]

Fair point about disrupting the flow, I will leave the footer links as they are.

Some of the links are at the top of the page with Register being a call to action.

Thx.

[irvingw]

there are ways around it though such as obfuscated javascript linking and other methods of making a link unrecognized as a link