A footer o footer is a line or block of text that appears at the bottom of a page or document separated from the main text. Footers include notes in the title of the page, or navigation within the document. On websites, footers are also a special area that is separate from the main body and the header. They usually contain information about the copyright and the date of creation of the website. Footer links are commonly placed there in addition, but their usefulness is controversial.
Background
A website is mainly divided into three main areas, the header, body and footer. While the header section is usually full of eye-catching graphics, or navigation, the body contains the content. Normally there is not much space for the footer, so only the information in the web portal creator is placed in it. Over the years, it has also become common for web designers or marketing agencies that created the page to link to their own website in the footer.
And this is precisely where footers became interesting for SEOs. Since the main page of a website is the strongest and transmits the most links (until the Panda update was implemented), many webmasters establish a series of backlinks in the footer to benefit from the greater link power viable provided by the web portal of links. The result was that many link exchange projects had high rankings and link power, but had little content. The footers were considered the secret weapon of SEOs for a long time. Google and other search engines reacted quickly. Excessive use of footer links ("widely distributed links in footers or templates across multiple sites") is clearly identified as SERP manipulation in the Google Webmaster Guidelines.[1]
Possible functions
Due to the generally limited space in the footer area, this web part generally has little functionality. In terms of usability, footers can generally be neglected because visitors have to scroll down to get to the bottom of the page. Otherwise, the footer is where you controls the navigation of the crawl page. When robots crawl the site, they can immediately access the web using "deep links" in the footer. In this way, they consume less crawl resources.
The possible characteristics of the footers are listed again here:
- Sensible distribution of link power through incoming internal links.
- Indication of the owner of the web portal.
- Indication of the year to indicate that the page is up-to-date.
- Information for contacts or terms and conditions.
- Benefits for search engine positioning.
The benefits of footers for SEO has been a known fact for a long time. Improve the positioning of the footer links. Currently, footer links are hardly used for external links. Exceptions could be if footer links are not used throughout the web, but only one footer link is inserted on the home page as "credit" to the web design agency. The text of the link should only contain the name of the brand and not the keywords of the link.
However, webmasters always should be careful when linking externally from a footer. The footers can still be used for the internal relationship to distribute the juice link from the home page specifically to the subpages. However, webmasters should be aware of the fact that this internal linking method does not contribute to usabilityThey are basically optimization measures for bots. Once crawl techniques are more advanced, it is questionable whether this type of internal link is still necessary.
Web Links
