SEO Links in Footer?

[vetofunk]

Hi,

One of my clients uses a pretty powerful SEO tool, won't mention the name. They now have a "link equity" tool, which they are using on a lot of their client's sites, which include tons of fortune 500 companies. It involves add footer links to your site that change based on the content of the page they are on. The machine learning tries to figure out the most related pages and links to them with the heading tag of that page as the anchor text.

Initially this sounds very spammy to me. But then, it seems a lot like "related products" tools that many companies use.

The goal for this tool is to build up internal linking, especially for deeper pages on their site. They have over 10,000 currently.

What are everyone's thoughts on this strategy?

[EGOL]

A lot of the "related product" widgets are presented with images and an article title, and sometimes with short article descriptions of the articles.  I don't think Google has a problem with them.  We use them.

But, you said these were "footer links".... and I would not use that.  And, if someone came to my office and wanted me to add naked footer links, I would kick them out the door.

[vetofunk]

They do have an option for "footer blocks". This includes a product name, part of the product's description and url. It's put into a box like section. Looks more legit than just a list of a few links.

[pilesofpillows]

Over the years Google has drastically devalued the SEO impact of Footer links, however, we have seen them generate a benefit in the form of referral traffic. I would be careful with having Exact Keywords in the footer links though, could seem spammy as you pointed out.