Effect of Removing Footer Links In all Pages Except Home Page

[Kingalan1]

Dear MOZ Community:

In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure.

The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding

My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors.

Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages.

Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic.

Thanks for your input!!!
Alan

[WestAdvertising]

Have you thought about turning the footer into a javascript footer that expands if someone clicks it? In essence, you would be removing the static footer to boost the UI and replace it with a dynamic footer that would continue to provide SEO (and occasional user) benefit.

I am interested in hearing the effects this removal has.

[Asjad]

Hey Alan,

Reducing footer links is certainly a good idea. Using lots of footer links is an outdated SEO Technique. Yes, adding text links is really a good and recommended thought!

It's not gonna affect your rankings. You can give links from other navigations like sidebar. If you are redesigning website, you must see this video of Rand: http://moz.com/blog/what-should-i-put-on-the-homepage-whiteboard-friday. It will help for sure!

Regards

[WesleySmits]

Footer links don't provide much SEO benefit anymore. It can even hurt your SEO if you overdo it.
If the links are not useful for the user than i would suggest dropping them altogether.

I do like the suggesting  provided by Eric Rubin though. A Javascript based toggle for the footer links would keep the UI pretty and clean while it still gives your users the ability to open the menu and visit any links there.

It all depends on the links though. If they are only there because of SEO reasons and not for helping users find good content then i would recommend just dropping them altogether.