Homepage Footer Links

[Victoria]

What does Google and the other search engines make of footer links on the home page of a site?

Thanks
Vicci

[JohnW]

Footer navigation (internal site links) if done normally are fine but links in the footer should be considered in the context of what they are; are they paid (sold) links, relevant or not, part of a cross linking scheme, only on home page or site-wide, etc. Bad links are bad if they are in the footer or anywhere else. Good links are OK in the footer or elsewhere.

[Victoria]

Makes sense, thanks John

[Gooner151078]

Remember that classic pagerank divides by the number of outbound links on a page so be careful that every one is beneficial to your entire site structure strategy. I use nofollow for anything that is compulsory from another stakeholders standpoint.

[jimbeetle]

Here's how Yahoo looks at footer links (http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-priyank-garg.shtml):

The irrelevant links at the bottom of a page, which will not be as valuable for a user, don’t add to the quality of the user experience, so we don’t account for those in our ranking. All of those links might still be useful for crawl discovery, but they won’t support the ranking.
Assuming that other SEs also segment pages, and knowing that they see a lot of link stuffing in the footer, my assumption is that they would also discount them -- at least to some extent -- along the lines of Yahoo.

[JohnW]

Jim, great find. This reverses what Yahoo hinted about footer links ( http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000444.html)in their 2007 ysearchblog "nocontent" tag announcement.

>Assuming that other SEs also segment pages

I think G does use some block level thinking but I don’t think they ignore content or links in any particular blocks.

Wonder if Google considers the nocontent tag ;-)

[jimbeetle]

I think G does use some block level thinking but I don’t think they ignore content or links in any particular blocks.
There's always the problem, trying to interpret what Google says and what Google does.

There was a Matt Cutt's post or interview or something in the past six months or year or so (and of course, I apparently don't have it bookmarked on this machine), that stated that Google can differentiate between paid and unpaid links by position on the page. Some folks took it as G being able to pinpoint specific links; I looked at it as Google using block level analysis to say "let's disregard what's in this block."

Either way, I think that getting links, or paying for links, within a distinguishable "block" might not be the best thing to do.

[Dan01]

I have a bunch of classified ads at the bottom of each of our pages. We rank pretty good in certain SERPS still.

[Victoria]

I need to employ all of you !!!