Does google treat links in footers differently than links surrounded by text?

Posted on 20. Jul, 2009 by Marc McDermott in SEO

A lot of people ask me about the value of external links placed in sidebars or footers as opposed to the value if placed contextually within a website. To touch on the sidebar link inquiry first, the thing that pops into my mind immediately is the infamous ‘Blogroll’ element. It is my strong opinion that a blogroll/sidebar link does not translate nearly as much value as one would within your page content. The same applies to footer/navigation links; for the purposes of this article, let’s refer to these as boiler plates.

I spoke about Boiler plates (also known as shingles) in my review article of Search Engine Strategies (SES) NYC. Boiler plates are essentially any section/element of your website that remains constant throughout your site. Common examples are of course navigation bars, blogrolls, footers, etc.

So why is an external link less valuable in these positions? I will answer a question with a question – what value does your boiler plate link provide to any particular page or article at any given time? More often than not, the answer will be, ‘slim to none.’

This may sound a bit confusing so let me provide you with a concrete example. Let’s say I am visiting a website dedicated to soccer fans/news. The homepage is a broad overview of all the latest news, articles, scores, etc. In the blogroll I see a link to ‘Fantasy Soccer’. Great! That CAN be a relative and value-added element to this site, so I go ahead and click on it. But then I go back to the original soccer site and click on a post about a specific player in Showbiz. I look at the sidebar and sure enough the Fantasy Soccer link remains. How does that now provide value to me on this current page?

Get your links/anchors placed contextually in pages or articles that are relevant to your given anchor, homepage and/or the sub page in which you are linking to. Forget about soaking up link juice from being in a blogroll displayed on every page of the site – get your link placed in a relative, user value-added section of the site.

The bottom line here is to remember that boilerplates are not unique – they are static. Why should Google place value on a link that took a webmaster 15 seconds to add to a blogroll rather than amongst well scripted, unique content?

These are of course my opinions and would certainly enjoy any counter-argument.