How to minimalise links in your footer

[Letty]

Hi guys,

I'm working on the website to improve the internal linking structure. We have thousand of pages, and on every single page we have the same footer with the same links. For this reason I would like to change the footer in only relevant links for the user, but also for the robots. So for the user I leave in the general main links Home / Contact / Promotions and customise a part of the links to specific links about the section they are looking at.

Now my idea was to add to the General Main links a Nofollow, so I direct the robots in a better structure about how to read the website.

I have been reading a lot about internal linkbuilding- like http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday  and

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/information-architecture-rocket-science-simplified/22503/

and a lot more, too much to display all. but my question would be, is it smart to internally start using NOFOLLOW's on links.

because I do found also some negative comments on this approach

http://www.dashboardjunkie.com/noindex-nofollow-canonical-and-disallow

I hope to get some feedback from the community to make up my mind.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

If you are trying to consolidate link authority by changing some links to be nofollow, that won't work. This would have worked a few years back when nofollow was used for pagerank sculpting, but G has changed the way these links are treated.

I would dofollow all the internal links on your site.

[Robert_G]

The opinions about the usage of internal nofollow links are mixed, but since Google changed how they treat nofollowed links using nofollow for internal links is not such a good idea.

Basically you are loosing link juice.

Now, what you can do, is to have (if possible) targeted links in the footer (if you are using WP you can accomplish that by using conditional tags).

The idea is to let PR flow naturally. This is the conclusion of my readings.

Spare 2 minutes and check out this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4SAPUx4Beh8

[DarinPirkey]

I second the dofollow advice from Oleg. Nofollow is not the way to go here.

I just want to add that your footer links need to be "relevant" to a person coming in to ANY page on your site.  That's how I try to build them.  Obviously there are some common ones, home, contact, etc.  If the link in the footer is only specific to a particular part of your website and wouldn't be helpful to someone coming into a different section, then remove them.  If it will help ANYONE no matter what page they are on, then keep them.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Letty,

I agree with the others here. There are exceptions, but for the most part you want Google to be able to follow most of the links on your site. The rule can be broken, but as a best practice there's usually no harm in following your links.

That said, I'm a big, huge fan of link consolidation and faceted navigation.

I've seen a lot of positive results from sites that have cleaned up and consolidated thier footer links, so I'm hopeful about what you're doing!