Internal Linking - Footer Links?

Hey, are footer links good to improve my OnPage Optimization?

My website has around 25 articles. The most important articles are found in the main navigation. These will help my conversion goals.

Now i want to include the rest of the articles (around 20) in the footer navigation with the keyword as anchor. These will help my traffic goals (i want to rank subpages in google).

Is this a good strategy or is their a better way for internal linking?

Personally for me, thats so 2004 strategy. I would either just put a link to my sitemap or rss in the footer and keep that clean. Perhaps make a new page and call it "articles" or some snazzy title and put html links to your articles on there. Put that one link in the footer.

EDIT: Sometimes I'll put a widget in and call it "reader favorites" or some shit and slap 5 posts in that. Make another one and call it "most linked content" or some crap, 5 more in there lol on the sidebar. But thats just really when I want to "fill out" a web page and make it "look" like some sort of authority lol.

That's just how I do it. Hope that helps.

Thanks, you gave me some good inspiration... you are right, footer links are not the sexiest option, that's why i'm asking. But will it benefit my SEO when i make an extra article page or a sitemap link? Isn't direct linking from the homepage better?

And i don't want to use the sidebar, this would screw up my design, so that's not an option for me...

I would absolutely NOT put in footer links at this time - I still don't think it's clear if the Penguin update may have included a lot of on-page as well as off-page factors. I definitely wouldn't try to do keyword heavy on-page stuff. Remember: whilst negative SEO can be harmful if it's done extremely hard, google can arguably be much more sensitive towards on page stuff, because you directly control it. If your site has a spammy feel, it's your own fault hence could indicate, in Google's eyes, that it's a crappy site. There was also something on seomoz that had it confirmed by Matt Cutts (sorry - too busy to find link), that google only takes the first instance of anchor text on your internal pages to another internal page into account. Therefore, if your links are in the footer and you've already linked to a page, they won't help improve things very much. I've actually just killed a ton of our on page keyword heavy linking - so the complete opposite - to try to get out of the Penguin update... I'll let you know if it works and therefore if you shouldn't do this.

Also when you say "direct linking from homepage" - I suspect the link juice gets diluted, so if you've got 200 links, they'll only be roughly each half as powerful as 100 links, so instead do a few carefully chosen links to your main pages, and then link down from your main pages to smaller, less important keyword-targeting, pages.

zmoney said:

Personally for me, thats so 2004 strategy. I would either just put a link to my sitemap or rss in the footer and keep that clean. Perhaps make a new page and call it "articles" or some snazzy title and put html links to your articles on there. Put that one link in the footer.

EDIT: Sometimes I'll put a widget in and call it "reader favorites" or some shit and slap 5 posts in that. Make another one and call it "most linked content" or some crap, 5 more in there lol on the sidebar. But thats just really when I want to "fill out" a web page and make it "look" like some sort of authority lol.

That's just how I do it. Hope that helps.

Click to expand...

Nice post! I would second this. Don't put links in the footer.

Thank you all. I think i'll just make a dropdown menu within the last menu item and put all article links there....