Will you get more 'google juice' if your social links are in your websites header, rather than its footer?

[Jacobsheehan]

Hi team,

I'm in the process of making some aesthetic changes to my website. Its getting quite cluttered so the main purpose is to clean up its look.

I currently have 3x social links in the header, right at the top, and i would really like to move these to the footer to remove some clutter in the header. My concern is that moving them may have an impact on the domains ranking in google.

Website: www.mountainjade.co.nz

We've made some huge gains against our competitors over the past 6 months and I don't want to jeopardise that.

Any help would be much appreciated as i'm self taught in SEO and have learnt through making mistakes. This time however, with Moz, i'd rather get some advice before I make any decisions!

Thanks is advance,

Jake S

[Travis_Bailey]

People like Jade. Why can't I like your individual products on the social medias? Maybe I can't afford whatever right now, maybe I never could - but I could put your site in front of thousands of people, with the click of a button.

I wouldn't recommend removing it from the header area. That is so minor, but if you must do so - at least observe traffic for a difference during a certain time period.

[JaneCopland]

Hello fellow Kiwi!

Moving the links to the company's social profiles won't make any difference to how well www.mountainjade.co.nz ranks, but it will make them much less visible and probably result in fewer clicks to each one. Do visitors to the website click on these at the moment? I would expect that traffic to drop substantially if the buttons are placed in the footer.

I honestly don't see these as a contributing to clutter or being an issue - they are fairly discrete both in terms of coding and aesthetics at the moment.

[Jacobsheehan]

Hi Jane

Thanks for letting me know that the move won't affect our rankings. I've decided to keep the social profiles in the header, but strip them of color to make them more discrete.

Great point re: expected drop in visits to the social profiles, however with Crazy Egg I noticed that only around 1% of visitors click the social links, so it's rather minor in the scheme of things.

Take care!

[Jacobsheehan]

Thanks for this Travis,

I took your advice and tracked the appropriate pages in Crazy Egg. The results confirmed my thinking, a very small number of visitors use the social links. Around 1%.

Regardless however, i've decided to keep them in the header for that 1%.

Best,