Does Google Penalize Too Many Footer Links?

What would you do if you saw hundreds of links on a website, with much of those being in the footer? Is that a natural surfing experience? Would Google penalize you for these links?

The penalty might not be the issue, actually. Tedster says that you should minimize the number of your links to preferably under 100. He also adds that it is probably not so much of a penalty but it's an issue of relevancy:

I don't think its really a penalty -- more like all that anchor text on a page sort of blurs or dulls the relevance signal, and too much internal linking can also make it difficult for the algo to tell which pages are most important.

Be careful with your linking in general. Ted adds:

Eliminating, or lowering the number of internal links in the footer is worth a try. Also note if there are many repetitions of an important keyword in the anchor text anywhere on the page. When that's done to excess, it does seem like it hurts rather than helps.

Not all folks agree (though I'm inclined to side with Ted on this one). One forum member has had luck with his 900 links:

I have ALL my links in the front page; 900 or so in a css menu that activates when they highlight a certain category. My traffic increased and all pages are in the index

Still, that could be due to other factors. Ultimately, what are you using your footer links for? A sitemap or not-so-relevant pages (like your privacy policy, etc.?)

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

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posted Tamar Weinberg in Google Optimization at January 25, 2008 9:44 AM Comments (14)

Comments

Footer links are ugly and in my opinion most people abuse the footer by loading it up with links they are embarrassed to show to users elsewhere on the page.

If I put a link in a footer, it's usually a link I'm willing to put elsewhere on the page. I don't like to put a lot of links in footers but I sometimes put a few.

I usually only put attribution links in footers ("This software provided by X", "Page designed by X", etc.).

If someone has more than 5 or 6 links in their page footers, they could probably improve their crawling and internal navigation considerably by changing their linking strategy.

Posted by Michael Martinez at January 25, 2008 13:09

Sorry. I wrote "I usually only put attribution links in footers" but what I meant to write (I was distracted) was something more like, "I would limit attribution links to footers...."

Posted by Michael Martinez at January 25, 2008 13:12

I'm not sure I agree with you guys. If you're doing topical navigation then your topics should be in your footer. If you're doing geographic navigation, then your primary locations should be in your footer.

One thing I am interested in is having all of those links in a CSS navigation (which we haven't tried yet) but I am speaking from experience when I say that footer links work, at least for us.

Posted by Tyler at January 25, 2008 17:09

I do not think Google penalizes for putting links in the footer in fact I have seen very good results in having good optimized links in my websites. Although with any area of optimizing for Google you have to be careful and you cannot put too many links in the footer.

Posted by Garrett Pierson at January 28, 2008 01:12

I do not think Google will penalize you for having links in your footer although if you have too many that are not optimized then yes it could give you a problem.

Posted by Garrett Pierson at January 28, 2008 01:14

Many sites use footer links for accessibility - eg if the main site navigation is made using images or (god forbid) flash, and many screenreader users actually navigate to the footer of the page for navigation links since they are easier to find than picking through the content, so in terms of accessiblity, limited navigation links are recommended.

Posted by myke black at January 28, 2008 05:38

I need suggestion: I optimised my website for a month, after that i was first with a lot different key. In two weeks later my homepage have lost a lot position. Any suggestion?
Sorry fo my engl...

Posted by Sardinia at January 28, 2008 18:15

I would suggest always having footer links on every page of a site as this can only be helpful for your viewers but I reccommend optimized pages only and not going crazy with listing every page. Imagine if google tried to put every link on the bottom of their pages....mmmm...could get pretty big I would think as well as being useless for the reader.
So by usng selective footer links this can only be helpful for SEO's as well as the readers and I couldnt imagine the search engine penalizing any site for doing it in this way.
Butterflyfantasy

Posted by Amie Etheridge at January 29, 2008 20:23

My site www.conexmetals.com is being punished for footer links.

Posted by ketan at February 21, 2008 05:10

I dont think this matters

Posted by Sunil at February 21, 2008 05:16

Hi It does matter and sites with lot of footer links dont do well

Posted by Amu at March 25, 2008 05:59

What we should avoid is excessive links in the footer. Up to ten footer links is acceptable, I believe. Google and Yahoo have human editors who visit websites and assess the quality of site structure and links.

Posted by No Name at July 30, 2008 13:47

Google will just ignore it if it's too many.

Posted by Alfie at August 16, 2008 09:14

Trend looks to move on helpfull and navigation links in footer : tools, topics, help and network links bring the best SEO results, and in the same time a good place for visitors to catch relevant links when looking your website.

I didn't experience penality but I experience no increase rankings, so footer should be moderate for ultra-SEO I think.

Posted by Patrice Albertus at December 1, 2008 08:13

Does Google Penalize Too Many Footer Links?

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