Are footer backlinks worth less than content backlinks?

[bitnig]

Hello everyone, I have a critical question for anyone who has been in a similar dillema before

It is very common for people among the "hacklink" community to place their hacked backlinks in the footers of the hacked websites. And so far all high authority hacked links that I've seen were sitewide footer backlinks, and I was very inclined to believe that footer backlinks were very important. This made sense as you would have things that are CRITICAL for your website down there, and content backlinks would simply be references. Now that I have been reading more and more about the topic, it is often told that content backlinks are more important than footer backlinks, which has me confused. It is very intuitive to value sitewide footer backlinks more than footer ones, and an entire community of hackers are still using it to rank websites that purchased their services. Are they wrong and content is the way to go? Does anyone have any comments regarding the issue?

 

[rafark]

Footer backlinks are not that powerful anymore. Think about it, if the site has hundreds or thousands of pages, you will be getting thousands of backlinks from that one site. You might think this sounds great, but actually, it's not really that true. A good contextual backlink surrounded by related keywords within the main content is much better.

 

[ANewBeginning]

Footer backlinks are not that powerful anymore.

But they still work, you just need to push more links like that.

The same with sidebar links. I've seen sites ranking with only footer+sidebar links

 

[ArnoldMC77]

They used to work great and still have some power IMO but they don't work even close to how they did 5-10 + years ago.

 

[Links Indexing]

Answer is very simple if you read google guideline than you can understand it in clear manner.

Let's understand what google says about links.

Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Now it's clear google don't like links.

But wait

Google still use backlinks as a primary ranking factor so it means google also loves links if they're relevant & natural.

Footer links are not relevant & natural for all type of webpages that's why google gives more value to contextual link rather than footer links.

 

[hideath]

Maybe less worth than a contextual homepage link, but I would say it's much better than a single page link,
I'm mainly pointing the guest posts here, where the page is basically made for the link, has no 2nd tier links, no traffic, etc...
While for the footer or sidebar links, you'll be getting the link juice from the top of the website pages where it will make a better kick

 

[BlackBat]

Agreed. Links in relevant body content work the best.

 

[Megaverse]

They used to work great and still have some power IMO but they don't work even close to how they did 5-10 + years ago.

Generally, nothing work great now in SEO as it did 5-10 years ago.
It's war time is SEO these days.

 

[wankawonk]

google assigns weight to links based on how likely are they to be clicked (reasonable surfer model, google it) so its pretty clear footer links won't provide much ranking power

but its still a citation -- especially if you use brand-name anchors -- which we know google likes. so it could help in building trust

 

[kuruptseo]

not only would i imagine it to be not effective... it can be quite destructive.

it goes against 2 major points of the google patent.

spiky growth in backlinks

spiky growth in anchor since they will probably all be the same anchor text.

also link schemes section on google.com says not to use footer links.

 

[Adam Weston]

Generally, Google values the links on a page the same way you read a book... from top to bottom, left to right. Links at the top of the page are going to be stronger than links at the bottom of the page.
There are tons of other factors such as if a link is surrounded by relevant content, but as a general rule of thumb, the strongest links on a page are at the top and the weakest are at the bottom.
Worth noting, this is based on the text version of a page. Sidebars are usually coded in a way that they show up after the body of the content.

 

[CharlieKhan]

Yes contextual backlinks have more power.

 

[Ashton_Thow]

If the footer link is the first one, Then it has same value i think.