Important Footer Link Facts You Need To Know

Search Engine Optimization techniques while looking simple are actually not only time consuming but also have various sub-categories that need to be addressed in order to improve the rankings of your site. Footer links are just one of many other factors that can play an important role in your SEO strategy – but how? Well, hold on to your horses and sit back as we unfold some important footer link facts that you should know for your internet marketing strategy.

Using Footer Links for Search Engines or… Users?

This is quite an important and interesting question and should be answered before we move on to determine what sort of links should stay on your site’s footer and which ones should leave. Before Google rolled out Penguin 2.0 Search Algorithm, footer links were useful for SEO specialists to optimize and improve the rankings of the sites. However, with the introduction of Penguin 2.0 it seems like the footer links are not that much effective the way they used to be in the past. As a result, it’s time to determine whether you’re putting links for users or the search engines? The former now pretty much rules the SEO strategies.

When used for search engines footer links don’t really provide any value to users and are normally stuffed with keywords linking to other pages or some sort promotional stuff, now that’s not a smart move in the year 2014 when things are going to become much more quality focused. It will also waste your time and hurt your SEO efforts because in the end the results wouldn’t be quite pleasing and Google along with other search engines is aware of the fact that if you’re not using the footer links to provide the users ease in navigation then it is unnecessary and you’re probably spamming.

What Next?

You must be wondering if the footer links’ optimization is not a good SEO practice any more then what should you do next. Well, that’s natural but you already are aware of the fact that stuffing keywords in footer area is not a good idea anymore – plus there’s no point of adding keywords you’ve already added on the content’s main page as well as other pages. On the other hand, when the footer area is used for anything other than providing users a way to navigate to other pages, a website can be flooded with many spammers as well and obviously that’s not ideal.

Optimum Usage

So, putting aside all the “professional advice” stuff what would be the optimum usage of the footer space? Considering the fact that how search engines are now closing in on spammers and people using black hat SEO techniques, it is high time that we start taking high quality SEO work seriously and use footer area for only navigational purposes and use keywords where appropriate i.e. main web pages, blog posts, product info, social media posts and so on. But let’s say goodbye to the links in the footer area for good.

We hope this article helped you understand the importance of the footer links and how the footer area should be used for future SEO work.