Duplicate navigation links downsides?

Same links on top and foot of page

[silverbytes]

I have a navigation bar on top of page, hierarchical. But is not very handy since very well organized. So I guess putting plain links on footer of page will help navigation. I'm afraid that can hurt in any way my rankings since links will be basically duplicated.
I posted myself before and some agree many sites do the same.

I wonder if is there any downsides about that duplicated navigation technique?

And if changing anchor text would make any difference, for better or worst

What do you say?

[mcavill]

I think google is pretty good at distinguishing the content from the nav template - so personally I doubt it'd matter - and if it helps users it's probably good etc, etc - but I've no experience to base that comment on :)

[silverbytes]

My concern is, since links will point the same page, the footer links navigation be considered "spammy"

[frup]

People often have graphical links in the main body of a page and text links down below for people who are visually impaired or for other reason use a text-based browser. Do you supposed Google is penalize all of those sites for being spammy?

If the links duplicated are internal navigation for your site, I can't imagine you'll have any problem.

[tedster]

Text links at the bottom are a usability enhancement in my mind - I do it for the visitors so they don't need to scroll to the top to see the main nav. And designing for our visitors is exactly what Google asks us to do.

I have such bottom links on 90% of the sites I manage - no problems that I can see.

[deanril]

Ditto to what tedster said.

[cws3di]

Absolutely agree with tedster and deanril - nav should be repeated at the bottom of the page so that your users don't get confused or lost.

The nav bar and link text should also be consistent throughout the site, for the same reason.

If you have a user on your site, don't confuse them, don't lose them.

[johan]

They annoying when using a screen reader (Accessibility issue and not SEO)

[Wizard]

Navigation in the beginning of page code is not good for Google, it tends to show it in snippet (even if there is well edited meta description), so I ofter hide it in JavaScript, to make page body beginning with H1 and main content. I leave footer navigation in plain HTML for crawling purposes. Works correctly.

[kierslee]

I agree with the previous posts. If the links are internal they shouldn't hurt. That being said I have a site that has about 16 links at the bottom that go to internal pages that are the site's big $ makers. Those pages all ranked well in MSN/Yahoo! but not Google (the site didn't rank in google due to duplicate content issues). Recently we added another line of links and many of those pages started to drop. We attributed it to too many links at the bottom of the pages and returned it to the way it was. Still waiting to see some of the terms come back up.

[jetboy]

They annoying when using a screen reader

Aye, but sensible use of skip-nav links would get around this.