I have one problem, I am working in leading IT Company related Web Design & Development.
I have been doing SEO since last more than 1.5 years.
I have noticed that my website was on 2nd before I have added footer links… but after adding to footer a link on my clients websites with proper anchor text (clients website pages are plus 30K) and out of that 20k links been crawling and losing rankings from 2nd to 6th rank…
can anyone guide me proper… how can I use footer links on my client side.
[FONT=verdana]It is highly unlikely unlikely that this perceived drop in rank was caused by your footer links.
Dropping from 2nd to 6th is not particularly signficant. There are over a hundred factors that can affect how you rank in search results - and they are constantly changing. Sites go up and down all the time. If you had dropped from 2 to 60, that would have been something to worry about, but going from 2 to 6 is another matter.
Keep in mind too that the ranking that you are seeing isn’t necessarily the ranking that another person will see. Google, in particular, applies “personal” factors in its ranking, including your search history, geographical factors, and factors relating to your social circle. You can’t really draw any conclusions from what you alone are seeing.
You need to use a comprehensive tool for (such as Google Webmaster Tools) for monitoring rankings. Concentrate on doing the best possible SEO for the site, and monitor its progress over a long period.
Could you please let us know how many links are there in the footer? You are basically passing link juice to other websites and that might have considered as spamming by google.
I am really surprised to hear this, since footer are harmless and moreover footer links from other websites, especially your client’s is highly worthy.
There might be some other reasons for your ranking downfall. You may have lost some of your precious backlinks, so try finding out which links you had lost in the last couple of months and make sure you get it back. Else, you might have stopped building links or getting natural links to your website. I would recommend to get some backlinks for the desired keywords either by article submission or through blog comments.
Moreover, there is yet another advantage of having links from your client’s website’s footer and that’s brand promotion. You are advantageous of getting some good references through your client’s website, so think in that perspective and maintain the links.
Not really. The whole point of having the internet is to have links between sites. Without links, the internet would collapse, and Google wouldn’t be able to work in the way it does. If the footer links look in any way relevant, there shouldn’t be a problem. Having a handful of internal or external links at the bottom of the page – as long as they don’t appear to have been hidden in any way – is perfectly normal practice, and not something that Google would penalise.
I’m not an expert but based on what I read, footer links may be devalued automatically by search engine. We know that first link on a page is the one whose anchor text counts and footer are likely not to have the desired impact. So footer is not the major reason why your ranking is gradually decreasing.
IMO, its just a impact of ‘Google Dance’ since they have made a major index update recently and are being implemented.
footer links may be devalued automatically by search engine.
I’m not saying that’s wrong, but do you have any evidence for saying that? There doesn’t seem to be any good reason for it. It would be interesting to know more.
BTW, are you talking in favor of or against the footer links?
Moreover, we must see the footer links as a good source of branding too. I believe this is the biggest advantage, considered with its effects on ranking.
I would say it is very likely to be true. The links you have in the footer are the ones that you have there because you have to have them, not because you want to have them. They’re usually links to things like the privacy policy, accessibility page, legal documentation, site design company and so on. They aren’t links that you are promoting strongly, or otherwise you wouldn’t put them in half-size text hidden way down at the bottom where not many people will see them and even fewer will click on them. So my gut-feeling is that it would make absolute sense for Google to treat any links that it perceives as being in the page footer as less important than links elsewhere on the page.
Thanks for those links, Eugeanne. I’ll have a close look at them. Thanks also to Stevie for his clear explanation. By the way, I don’t really need convincing. I wasn’t saying that you were wrong. It’s just that I hadn’t come across this before. Mike
I always thought SEOMoz usually believed that links have less value the further down a page they are. This would make sense because as Stevie is pointing out, the stuff down there is usually less important and stuff not generally clicked a lot. I don’t think Google would ever penalize for these links or give a “negative value”, if anything they would just be worthless links giving no value. At the very least someone might like the design of a website and make their way to your site from a footer link.
Haha, Not really there are many other reasons due to that it is happening, it is one of the natural way, you are not buying links but you are earning credit as you created that. You are well ranked for top key words… (May be you are for some one particular I see you for major) Variation of key words might help you. I see you have done well for branding. Search are you affected with Panda (May be some one has duplicated your content- The same content at your home page is duplicated at some other place too)
2. You might be a victim of link spam!