Navigation Links in Footer

[kasi]

What are your thoughts about navigation links in the footer? For example: www.chasepaymentech.com - good, bad, or indifferent for SEO?

[SparkplugDigital]

There are many good reasons to have navigation links in the footer. For example, there might be lower priority pages on your site that are important enough that you still want to flow some link juice to them. Additionally, a homepage link to your HTML sitemap can be a good way to flatten your site architecture, but you usually don't want to put the sitemap link in the header navigation.

[sferrino]

Another reason for doing it is for the user experience. They no longer have to scroll back up to the top to change pages. The one problem that I ran into was having too many links on one page by doing this, I fixed it by using an iframe instead. It looks the same, and still provides the linking to the user that I wanted.

[kasi]

Thanks so much! I've heard conflicting information about it - a couple of sources said that having all those links in the footer might look spammy to the search engine.

[kasi]

Awesome, thank you! I hadn't even thought of that from the user perspective.

[jennita]

One thing to know is that Google often devalues footer links, so while it's usually not a problem to have links in the footer, don't expect them to bring you lots of linkjuice love.

[sferrino]

I agree. I do it for the user, not for Google, which I think is what Mr. Cutts says to do all the time.

[softlinesoltns]

Footer links can definitely be used to enhance user experience and as Steven Ferrino said, "flatten out you site for Google" It is a place where you want to include a sitemap map as well as any other pages that you do not want to necessarily have on your main nav bar.

As far as SEO purposes, this will not really benefit you.  I can not say that it won't be of any help, but in my opinion those links are not really optimized and as always, it is better to have in body anchor text links versus bottom footer links.

Best of Luck!