Footer links are links in the footer of a website. Because the footer repeats on every page, these links appear sitewide on every URL. Typical entries are legal pages, contact and links to main sections.
What do footer links mean for SEO?
Google can crawl a link when it is an <a> element with an href attribute, and every page you care about should be linked from at least one other page. Footer links meet that condition technically. They do not replace links inside the content that explain how pages relate (assessment).
Google’s spam policies list “widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites” as link spam. This describes links spread across many different sites, such as credit links in themes with keyword anchor text. A site’s own footer navigation is not what that example describes (assessment).
Example
<footer>
<nav aria-label="Footer">
<a href="/privacy/">Privacy</a>
<a href="/contact/">Contact</a>
</nav>
</footer>
Common mistakes
Links that only work through a JavaScript click handler cannot be reliably parsed by Google, according to its documentation. Long lists of keyword-rich anchors are widely seen as a warning sign (assessment).
Sources
- Link best practices for Google – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Spam policies for Google web search – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Website footers – Nielsen Norman Groupnngroup.com
- Sitewide links – Search Engine Journal (secondary)searchenginejournal.com
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