ProStores Tips and Tutorials - One Take Media

A recent article at SEOmoz, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/footer-link-optimization has me thinking about footer links and their value to your site and its rankings.

Most people have a footer with links in their site. Some use it to list pages that they don’t deem as important as the links at the top of their site but don’t want to just not link to them. Some people use footer links to try to manipulate their rankings buy using highly target keyphrases or keywords linking to their own or other’s content. (I fall into the latter).

But as the article suggests, as does a couple the comments, this method may be falling under more scrutiny by the search engines. Rand Fishkin, President of SEOmoz lays out a good article showing examples of that he would consider good and poor Footer link structure.

Tom_C points out that he tries to encourage his clients, at best, not depend on footer links for helping with ranking. He even cites an incident where Yahoo Site Submit even rejected a client site until he removed the footer links.

Long and the short of it? Read Rand’s article, make a well thought out decision, maybe answer the question, “Will these footer links really benefit the people who visit my site?”.

I know I’ll be thinking about it long and hard.

Tracking your backlinks is very important. Here are a couple methods to do so.

Sign up for google webmaster tools, it will show you a list of some of your backlinks. good article on finding your links from Google. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/02/discover-your-links.html

You can go to www.yahoo.com and put linkdomain:yoursite.com -domain:yoursite.com into the search bar.

I also recommend you sign up for Yahoo Site explorer and you can view a large portion of those who link back to you that yahoo has in its database.

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
type in the search bar site:www.website.com

Click the Inlinks button > click the first drop down and choose “except from this domain” then once that loads again move to the second drop down and choose “Entire Site”. This site has a few tools that are very beneficial. Get the SEO Link Analysis plug in by Yoast, it gives you on page analysis of the backlinks and is very useful. While your at it sign up for Yoast’sRSS feed. Sign up for our ProStores Tips and Tricks Feed as well.

There a lot of third party tools as well. http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/backlinks is one i use a lot, it will also show you a historical list of your backlinks. It uses siteexplorer but like I mentioned before it will show you how many you used to have. So it provides a good basis for comparison.