Do the external links at footer menu take away PR or Linkjuice?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

We have some external links on our footer menu. I'm just trying to figure out whether these take away pagerank. What if they are follow or nofollow? How fair to have DMCA badge with link at footer? Will this hurts?

Thanks

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

External links in your footer won't hurt your PageRank but it will give a boost to the pages you're linking to (if they are follow). These links should also be relevant to your website, provide value to the user, and there should only be a couple of them as to not come across as a link farm.

That being said, I would be very weary of externally linking from your footer, though. The reason being is that this is on every single page of your website and potentially will take users off of your website. Even then, if they are important external links, most of the time users don't even make it to the footer, so they may never see them to begin with.

If they are important, use them with purpose and place them on and in pages where users will see them and find value. If they are not important, I wouldn't bother linking to them, let alone in the footer.

That's just my two cents, hope this helps!
P

[ThompsonPaul]

Further to Patrick's point, remember that a page passes its authority to other pages by dividing up the page's "power" (ranking authority, or your term Pagerank) and distributing it relatively evenly through all the outgoing links on the page. So if you have a bunch of links to external sites, you're sending a significant amount of that "power" to other sites instead of distributing to your own pages.

The web is built on the effectiveness of hyperlinking, so this isn't an argument to never link out from your site, but having a number of not-very-useful external links on every page dissipating your own page power unnecessarily isn't a good strategy. (And no, no-following those links doesn't change the fact they send your page authority away instead of keeping it for the other links.)

Hope that helps clarify?

Paul

[vtmoz]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the response and such detailed answer. One thing I would like to know is, we are clear that the pagerank or authority will be divided for the number of internal pages. Will it be the same case with external links too as you mentioned? I agree that some authority will be added to the external page we are linking....does that really means we are loosing some? I have seen here from other SEOs that we are not going to loose any pagerank with external linking.

Thanks

[ThompsonPaul]

No question - the page's authority is divided up amongst all links on the page, not just the internal ones. That's why I made the recommendation I did.

To be clear - you're not "losing Pagerank" for the page that contains the links. You're losing the ability of that page to pass some of it's power to other pages on your own site, by having that power sent to external sites instead.

Paul