Andres from Boston, MA asks: “Does Google treat links in footers differently than links surrounded by text (eg in a paragraph)?” This video is part of a “Grab Bag” series in which Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, answers questions from users. We’re not currently taking new video questions, so your best bet for getting an answer about webmaster-related search issues is to head to our help forum: www.google.com
How do you determine what a footer link actually is? is it a link with no surrounding text that is repeated across the site? if so, wouldn’t menus also fall prey to this pagerank reduction?
I still did not understand from the video which of these links are better? Footer links or links in main content. And how do google classify links as footer and main content links?? Video would be more explanotory..
if you don’t want to watch the video – the answer is ‘yes’
Agreed DirtyMonkey815 !
Site wide links, footer links, menus are not useful as links inside a paragraph.
Also, Link exchanges can take a back seat now.
bosduvarlar – Incontent links hold more editorial weight than footer links because the vast majority of incontent links over the web are much more relevant to the sites they point to than footer links.
Matt pretty much just reiterated the fact that getting incontent links from niche related websites hold a lot more weight than blogroll links on unrelated websites.
That’s not at all what he said. He’s never going to tell us something that specific. He said they reserve the right to weight paragraph links differently than links on other parts of the page that might not be as relevant to the content on that page.
He did NOT say: “Blogroll links that appear on 200 different pages of 1 site are less valuable than “incontent” links from another site.”
His statement was relative to the two different types of links on the same page, see the difference?
Interesting video. It’s about what I’d figured.
I remember someone else who does SEO telling me about his SEO “silver bullet” being footer links and apparently how great it was. Maybe not so great?