Footer Links Good or bad?

[iprosoftware]

Hi

Can anyone answer this question confidently, I know Google is moving away from lots of links within the footer.  However we specialise in websites for the travel industry and having a link to all the areas at the footer can be quite handy.  Our websites complete this automatically.

Here is an example where due to design of the site the links don't quite fit well, so we need to change anyway.  But before completing the work I wondered if there was a better way to do this.

http://www.dreamvillasitaly.com/

Many thanks

Andy

[stevefidelity]

There's absolutely nothing wrong with footer links per se. It's just the fact that it's an inconspicuous part of the site, so SEOs have thought it was an easy place to sneak in some good links.

One example that I have (I won't dive into the details too much), is a competing SEO company in my local. He has the most SEO-friendly name you can could imagine, and he tosses his SEO-friendly/anchor text-rich name into the footer of all the sites that he works on. His link profile consists of almost all blog comments and these footer links. He ranks super high for 'SEO big name city', when there are clearly much, much more authoritative sites that should be showing up ahead of him.

So you definitely can't say that search engines are discarding the value of footer links.

[iprosoftware]

Hi Greg,

Thanks for the update, can you point me in the right direction for creating the javascript drop down menu.

Thanks

Andy

[bfrl]

Hi Andrew,

These days I see relatively little benefit from a SEO perspective of footer links.

However, they can be very valuable from a user experience point-of-view. If you think that your visitors will find this section of your site useful to navigate to relevant areas of your site that they might be interested in then I would be in favour of using such an approach.

[GregFindley.co.uk]

Hi Andy,

I don't think there's anything wrong with having a deep footer with useful links to pages within your site, as long as they are there for the benefit of your visitors. With your example, I would personally look to move those links in to your main content area on the homepage, perhaps with a CSS/Javascript map of Italy that shows all the town locations as clickable links? That way you're still including those links from your homepage but in a more useful manner for the user.

Then if you wanted to keep the links on your inner content pages too, you could simply have a location dropdown box in your sidebar with the listings and a 'Go' button or similar.

My personal preference would probably be to just keep them to the map setup on the homepage, then perhaps introduce regional content pages with enlarged sections of the main map, so South Italy, North Italy, etc, etc.

Hope that helps in some way.
Greg