Every site that I have been visiting lately shows me more links in the footer than in the sidebar or the top navigation bar. Without giving any importance to the usability guidelines or relevance, certain sites just spread the links to boost their internal link structure and optimize the anchor text.
Usually, depending upon the navigation of the website, the most important links are placed such that visitors are easily able to locate them. The unimportant links (for a user) like Privacy Statement, Terms of Use, etc. make way in the footer region. This is so because hardly any user would ever look at the footer if his needs are satisfied by clicking the links elsewhere.
Until a few years ago, I remember web designers used to drop a link to their site for every site designed/developed by them. There’s nothing wrong with that. After all, it only promotes your brand and helps you in getting more inquiries. But with search engines getting smarter, the anchor text plays a big role on every link you have on your site. And if you use irrelevant anchor text, your site will probably lie deeper in the search results.
In an attempt to trick the search engines and generate lot of links to their site, webmasters get involved in link farms, placing numerous links on their site. And the best place for them to place the links is the footer section because that’s the least expected region to be visited by the user. But if these links are not relevant and uses incorrect anchor text, the SEO efforts would be a complete waste.
Look at the footer of this site –> Sai Info Soft
What did you see? Lot of irrelevant links to various other sites, right. And did you pay attention to the anchor text being used there? Its just the domain name that is being used as anchor text to improve its ranking. Now what do you expect the main site (Sai Info Soft) to rank for?
The intention of highlighting this example is to show how certain webmasters are exploiting the footer region of the websites for better search rankings; only to fall flatly on their face.
The website and its various sections are meant to help the visitor get a complete hang of the site and its offerings. Its very important to keep the user in mind when dealing with the footer links as major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing have already indicated that they de-value the footer links. So there’s hardly any chance that excessive links in footer would help in the search rankings.
I feel that its more important to keep the footer clean or include minimal links so that the user doesn’t get confused. Whats your take? Have you ever benefited by including lot of links in the footer? I would like to hear from you.
