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Starhugger
Posts: 631
Joined: 4/12/2005
From: Canada
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Footer sitemap links and SEO - 10/2/2009 18:23:53
I've recently seen a trend to put a sitemap (links to all pages on the site, or at least the main pages) in the footer. This strikes me as a very cool way to (a) have a concise sitemap for visitors and (b) ensuring that all pages of the site are visible and accessible from any page. Theoretically I would think this would also help raise the PR rank of even lower level pages on the site, since they're not buried underneath clicking through from other pages.
However, somewhere recently I read that Google crawls only the first 25 links on a page and ignores the rest. So for a large site that would have a lot of links in a footer sitemap, I'm wondering how valid this idea would be, especially on pages that already have a number of links within the content. And could this possibly backfire and be interpretted as a kind of "link bombing" of the page?
I've been testing a possible version of this on my development site so that you see what I'm talking about.
Does anyone have any thoughts or knowledge about this? Thanks!
Starhugger
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Mojo
Posts: 2472
From: Chicago
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RE: Footer sitemap links and SEO - 10/6/2009 10:48:00
quote:
mewhere recently I read that Google crawls only the first 25 links on a page and ignores the rest.
Not true. Google will follow 100's of links on a page. That said, it's best to have far fewer -- I like to have 40 or fewer links on the home page, but you can safely go with more depending on the number of pages in your Web site.
The site map in the footer has been used for a long time and is not really an SEO technique unless you have navigation issues.
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Starhugger
Posts: 631
Joined: 4/12/2005
From: Canada
Status: offline
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RE: Footer sitemap links and SEO - 10/6/2009 11:07:20
Hi Mojo,
Thanks for your reply. That's a relief to know this about the SE crawlers.
What actually got me thinking about doing this was that my links pages suddenly fell off the radar with a PR of zip after they once had at least some PR. The main links page still has a PR, but all other pages are either linked only from that main page or else they're relatively new (less than a year old) and the only extra link is the home page. I got thinking maybe it would make sense to link to all of them in the footer and then my thoughts just kept going from there. ;-)
I also have found that at least one of my biggest SE traffic keywords has lately been drawing far less traffic. I'm not sure if it's just other sites that are competing more or if G changed their algorithm or if I should just be using the keyword more, but doing the footer sitemap would also give me more opportunity to use that and other prime keywords.
I'm now wondering about putting a CSS dropdown menu in the header links (which go to the main content of the site), which would let me pump up the prime keywords more and also use better content navigation, and then putting a more extensive list of links in the footer (like to all links pages) while repeating links to main sections (but not individual pages). Maybe that's a better compromise, since it places the best keywords at the top of the page while still providing links to more obscure pages in the footer. I would just need to make sure that the header navigation is reasonably accessible (or at least the main pages are fully accessible), so I'm thinking a single-tier dropdown using CSS only is probably the way to go.
Does all that make sense? I can see why there are people who specialize just in SEO - it's very complicated, and that doesn't even include the fact that G is always moving the cheese!
SH
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