Service Location links in footer and on the service page - spamming or good practice?

[AndyL93]

We are are a managed IT services business so we try and target people searching for IT support in a number of key areas. We have created individual location pages (11) to localise our service in these specific areas.

We put these location links in the footer which went to the specified IT support pages respectively. Now we have created a general 'managed IT services' page and are thinking of linking to these specific pages on there as well as it makes sense to do it.

Would having these 11 links in the footer as well as on the 'managed IT services' page be spamming? or would it be good practice? If this is spamming, which linking location should hold preference.

Would appreciate the feedback
Thanks
Andy

[Roman-Delcarmen]

A link in the footer does not have the same value of a link in the body, check this article of Rand Fishkin about How Links in Headers, Footers, Content, and Navigation Can Impact SEO

Links in footers often get devalued

So if there's a link that you've got in your footer, but you don't have it in your primary navigation, whether that's on the side or the top, or in the content of the page, a link down here may not carry as much weight internally. In fact, sometimes it seems to carry almost no weight whatsoever other than just the indexing.

There's another good post about it Here is what Google says about footer links and penalties.

So what you can do?

Create 10 or 20 articles you can buy it or do it yourself, search for some blogs who accept guest post and submit your articles with this links to your site, so this links will give you traffic, relevance, and authority.

In summary, avoid footer links

[JoyHawkins]

I definitely would not put these in the footer.  Marie Haynes has a very good article on footer links that I normally reference: https://www.mariehaynes.com/footer-links-and-penalties/

Like Roman said, links in the footer don't offer much value anyway and put the site at risk for looking low-quality.

[AndyL93]

Thanks for the response Roman.

So the on-page internal links are a must and the footer links probably should be avoided.

This was my initial thought but i was swayed by our increase in rankings for some pages as well as a similar business who have done this method and rank highly in most support areas.

Gaining back links is next in our to do list!

Cheers