There has been some ongoing discussion about whether or not Google should penalise sites with a large amount of footer links. Footer links are something that we have all come across while surfing the net, and in a link-building environment, web pages are easier to surf using footer links.

In a post I read from Seroundtable, it is said that the footer links wont actually be penalised if your links are relevant and kept under a certain limit. I fully agree with this. If you have over 100 links with all different anchor text, Google might crawl your site and lose what the true content in your site covers. Whereas if your footer links are all relevant, and there are not a lot of them, it might work to your advantage. Relevance to the content would be the key to remember when creating footer links.

In addition to lowering the number of links in the footer, another thing they say you should avoid is having many repetitions of keywords or anchor text on a page, because that might hurt your site’s ranking.

Many users employ the footer links as a quicker way to move around any website, instead of going through a menu on the top of the page, and clicking through a number of times before reaching your destination. That does not mean you have to go out and put a link to every page on your site in your footer but rather add links to important pages that your visitors would want to see or those that you want your visitors to see. You could also add some links to related authority sites.

No user likes to look through a whole lot of links cramped into a tiny space at the bottom of the page with font size 6, that you have to strain your eyes just to see the anchor text. Think about your visitors next time you want to design your website with all those footer links.

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