What is this exactly? Whiteboard Friday warning about footer links.

[isaac663]

Hi guys.

I've just been watching this whiteboard Friday.   At 2.01 mins Rand mentions something about a penalty that Google gives for certain internal linking practices.  I'm a little confused about it.

Something along the lines of... 'stuffing keyword rich anchor text in the footer and nav bar'

Does Rand mean repeating keyword rich anchor text in these areas?

Or just that it's stuffing by nature... because it's on every page of the site?

Hope that makes sense.

I've attached a screen shot of our footer.  Could you let me know if this is bad form?

Thanks in advance

CLYGpiI

[LureCreative]

Great question, maybe a Mozzer will jump on for more clarification, but I believe Rand was referencing doing the "repeating footer links", as in having many footer links with exact anchor text or anything similar. A "sitewide link" that is simply just one link at the footer, often used by web development or design companies, will not get you a Google penalty. With that being sad, footer links, especially, sitewide ones, do not carry much value for increasing rankings. They can be good for referral traffic though. Hope this helps and best of success!

[randfish]

Yep! The sitewide link penalty, also commonly known as the footer link penalty or the "web design by" penalty is a pretty common (though not 100% universal) link dampener. Google mostly just ignores those links now, but they sometimes used to actively penalize for their presence (and may still in certain cases). My best advice is to instead link from your about page or another well-linked-to page on your site vs. linking from every page.

[isaac663]

Thank you Rand!  Just a quick follow up if I may?

So should we worry about this in our header section also?

We know from Hotjar that our users find the header Nav useful to really fine tune their search for our products...  Week view diaries, day per page diaries, 30, 20, 15 mins appointment diaries etc.

Seems like a crazy penalty (even if they have revoked it now).  I mean we just added this for UX  Blagged.

[randfish]

Header? It's pretty unusual to have or to get an external link in the header (most users assume, accurately, that headers are internal navigation).

If you're talking about internal links, no problem! Footers, headers, sidebar navs -- all are expected to have sitewide links. We're just talking about external links that can be perceived as link spam.

I also did a WB Friday video on this that should be going up in the next few weeks with more detail. Basic story in your case is, if the links are internal, and they're not spammy-anchor-text/intentionally manipulative/hidden from users/etc, you should be just fine.

[isaac663]

Hi Rand, thanks so much for getting back to me again.

I think we may be cross purposes here. Ha.  Just to be clear I was just asking purely about internal links in the context of your WBF here.  (2 mins specifically)

The basic question is: Can keyword anchor text in footer links (naturally) linking to other relevent pages on our site induce any kind of penalty?  Due to the fact they are on every page does this look 'spammy' or intentionally manipulative?

(I feel I may have got the wrong end of the stick here tbh).

[randfish]

If they're keyword rich and manipulative in nature, then yes, they could get you penalized. If they're more "accidentally" keyword rich because that's what the pages are called, you're probably fine. For example, if Moz happened to have a page called "SEO Tools" and it was linked to in the footer of our site, no big deal. If, however, we had "SEO Tools" | "SEO Software" | "Check SEO Rankings" | "SEO Guide" | etc. that would be more likely to get us in trouble.

[isaac663]

Understood, and thanks!  Really appreciate your time Rand!