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.
Matt –
I was just going through the board at prostores and realized we are both in Michigan. So I can to check out your site. Lots of good information here. I was just thinking about doing a bunch of footer links before I read this post. Keep up the good work.
-B
I am kinda new to Internet marketing and is having great problem getting marketing going. I need some assistance on SEO, is there anyone out there who can help?