Sitewide footer links - bad or not?

[activitysuper]

Hi,

Sitewide footer links, is this bad for SEO?

Basically I see all the time the main navigation repeated in the footer, sometimes as almost something to just fill the footer up.

Is this bad for SEO (im guessing it is) and can you explain why you think it is?

Cheers

[newwhy]

I think it's erroneous to say that users don't want to see "built by" in the footer. I am often curious about who built or designed a website, and seeing that in the footer helps me navigate there. How does Google decide what a user wants to see or doesn't want to see? If a link is clicked on often, by a variety of IP addresses, could that indicate that it's a useful link and shouldn't be discounted, even if it's in the footer?

[kumidiaweb]

Quite curious with this as I see no definite answer to this.

Let's say that I build a site for a client and place a footer that says  "built by me"...

Will that footer link impact my rankings?

But just to be safe possibly a rel="nofollow" would be an option. Would like to hear your opinion on this.

Thanks!

[bradkrussell]

You say "Basically I see all the time the main navigation repeated in the footer, sometimes as almost something to just fill the footer up." - you have to remember that only the first link on the page to a specific URL is counted. So if a link is repeated in the footer, it's worthless (from a SEO point of view, it may be beneficial for user experience/navigation).

The days of linking key terms in the footer are numbered, don't think SEO, think user experience.

[DCochrane]

You should pick your top 10-20 most important pages on your website & link them from your footer. Since the homepage normally has the most domain authority you want to try to pass along some of the authority to the other pages within your site that you want to rank.

Don't put too many links in the footer as this will over-dilute the home page link juice.

[irvingw]

it is not bad if you are doing internal linking and not anchor text spamming in the footer links. It can be used to pass PR to more important pages but should mostly be though of as providing the user a better experience when navigating your site.

footer links are bad for SEO when linking to other sites or when other sites link to you since that creates hundreds, thousands or even millions of links with the same anchor text. it's an old SEO tactic that no longer works

[donford]

Linking to pages in the footer generates more links which dilutes link juice passed to all pages that are linked to. Usually the footer is where non-important SEO pages are located but important pages for customer experience like, accounts / support / contact / privacy / terms of service / legal.

You should always side with the USER EXPERIENCE it should not be frustrating for your users to find what they are looking for. Taking that into consideration you should also keep the links to less important SEO pages sitewide to a minimum and not duplicate your navigation unless it makes sense from a usability standpoint. Other-words don't do it to fill up space.