Are Footer links bad for SEO?

This may not be the latest from the SEO world but it has cropped up a few times recently so I thought some Estate Agents may be interested in knowing the details about footer links.

Footer links are links at the bottom of a website that link to internal web pages. These links usually contain keywords the site is optimising for and don’t really have any relevance to the user.

Google sees these types of links to be unnatural and only in place for the search engine (which obviously Google doesn’t like) but do these links still benefit your websites SEO?

The official answer is NO – footer links won’t help with your SEO.

Earlier this year Matt Cutts said “We’ve done a good job of ignoring boilerplate, site wide links. In the last few months, we’ve been trying to make the point that not only is link buying like that not doing any good, we’re turning the dial up to let people know that certain link spam techniques are a waste of money.”

What this means is that using footer links to promote certain keywords, in hope of them gaining more SEO value won’t work anymore. Not only this but it also could actually harm your websites rankings overall.

Google has always stressed that websites should focus on optimising for the user making it easy for them to navigate the site as quickly and efficiently as possible and that trying to optimise for the search engine can actually have a negative effect on their Google rankings.

By Luke Stanley
SEO Consultant