Links in header and footer

[olly]

Hi

As in our case, most sites run off a template-based system where there is a common header/footer on every page. In our case we have a network of websites, let's set them up theoretically as follows:

red-widgets.com
blue-widgets.com
yellow-widgets.com
and so on...(25 domains in total all on same class C IP)

In the footer of each of these sites is exactly the same pool of links, all to the homepages of the domains listed above. So, every page on red-widgets.com, blue-widgets.com, etc would link to the list above in the footer. There is an average of about 500 pages of content per domain above.

At present the homepages of all these sites rank very well for competitive terms. Some of the main listing pages, however, seem to underperform, i.e. pages of the type www.red-widgets.tld/sub-category-of-red-widgets

* Do I have to worry about so many outgoing links on every page?
* One would expect the homepages to be powerful and pages inside the domains to be dampened, is this a true statement?
* Would it be better to rather just cross-link the network from the homepages only, i.e. don't show the footer on any other pages?
* Is there anything wrong with having the exact same header/footer on every page in the network?
* Can anyone suggest an alternative setup producing better search rankings?

I've tried my best not to be too vague, I'm really looking forward to anyone's input on this situation.

Thanks!

[edited by: tedster at 10:43 am (utc) on June 29, 2009]
[edit reason] de-link the example url [/edit]

[Robert Charlton]

Is your mini-network receiving many good quality inbound links from sites independent of your network... and is each site building an independent link profile? Or, are the sites also sharing common inbound link sources?

The desired setup, IMO, would be completely independent sites, perhaps cross-linked minimally for the user. I myself wouldn't cross-link at all.

If you're using cross-links in the network to have all the sites boost up each other, chances are you're going to run into trouble no matter how much you try to tune the cross-linking. The current degree of cross-linking you describe sounds excessive.

[icedowl]

If you feel you really need to link out to these other sites then what I'd do is to build one page that has a link and a description of each of the sites, then link only once to that page with wording along the line of "Related Sites", "Visit our other sites" or whatever wording you may have that best suits the situation.

I'm just speaking as a potential visitor who has been online for 15 years and I have seen a lot of different types of interlinking done in that time. The mass linking in a header or footer has been a turn off for me when I've encountered it.

[olly]

Thanks for the replies guys.

Is your mini-network receiving many good quality inbound links from sites independent of your network... and is each site building an independent link profile? Or, are the sites also sharing common inbound link sources?

We have been building up each site independently with inbound links most closely related to that particular sites field of context - and yes, all these inbound links are outside our network.

If you're using cross-links in the network to have all the sites boost up each other, chances are you're going to run into trouble no matter how much you try to tune the cross-linking. The current degree of cross-linking you describe sounds excessive.

I'd have to agree with you here 100% - the cross linking would add no value to all except a tiny handful of users who happened to be interested in both sites products.

The questionable affect on rankings has a conclusion which is congruent with the above.

Clearly just having one page which contains the cross-linking sounds like the way to do it.

My only concern is that the homepages might experience a drop with all of these incoming links being removed...however, the majority of it's ranking "power" must come from external links and not inbound links on the same class C network with identical layouts. Google would surely discount the latter considerably.

Assuming we proceed with the above trajectory, i.e. remove all footer links, do you think it is possible to incur some sort of penalty - something along the lines of a "mass update" which triggers a warning in Google? We will be updating approx 6,000 pages across our network...

[BradleyT]

Why don't you just remove 1 of the sites from the footer and see how it [the removed site] gets impacted after 3-4 weeks?

[edited by: BradleyT at 3:58 pm (utc) on June 29, 2009]

[olly]

Why don't you just remove 1 of the sites from the footer and see how it [the removed site] gets impacted after 3-4 weeks?

That would probably be the safest thing to do...but truthfully I just don't have the patience! Seriously though - considering the arguments above I feel fairly confident that removing them and just crosslinking on one page is the correct way to approach it.

Onto a related but separate topic...

On each site there is a full "widget category" list in the header. This list only links to category pages within the current domain, i.e.

red-widgets.com/sub-category-1
red-widgets.com/sub-category-2
red-widgets.com/sub-category-3
etc

This list contains approx 100 categories. What are the implications of having this on every single page (approx 500 domains) in the domain? Does this constitute effective internal linking in terms of SEO?

[olly]

Hey

I have subsequently read that one should aim to not have more than 100 internal links on any site pages in general - is this true? This seems to indicate that the outlined situation below is not good:

On each page on the site there is a full "widget category" list in the header. This list only links to category pages within the current domain, i.e.

red-widgets.com/sub-category-1
red-widgets.com/sub-category-2
red-widgets.com/sub-category-3
etc

This list contains approx 100 categories.

(doubt it's relavant but just in case - the list of category links is made available via a scrollable div)

[tedster]

Too many internal links offers a poor user experience and it's more of a challenge to any algorithm as well. I usually work to be in the area of 40 to 50 internal links when I work on a re-design and the results so far have been very strong.

I consulted on a redesign project last year who just wouldn't go along with that idea - they wanted well over 100 links in the average page because they had "too many categories and related products" that they felt needed to be placed in front of every visitor. In fact, they went with another consultant at that point.

I just checked in on the rankings I know that they were targetting - their new design has clearly tanked! I started a discussion last summer that relates very strongly to this idea. You may find it gives you some further ideas: The Mega Menu Problem [webmasterworld.com]

...scrollable div

No essential difference, because the links are all in the source code for the url. Now, a scrollable iframe might be a different story.

[olly]

Hi tedster

Thanks for that reply, busy reading through the mega menu thread now, serious wealth of info, great resource :)

As partially explained, we currently use a horizontal menu header on our site, but a few of the items, when moused over, produce a scrollable div of links. I just checked the home page and we are on 190+ links!

The funny thing is we rank relatively well and traffic is good too - we have a solid entourage of back links holding up our rankings. I think this has gone unnoticed because it has just made our job harder rather than incur any serious penalties.

What I am going to do is update the top header to be page specific, according to the following basic guidelines:

HOMEPAGE
Going to update DIV to show only top 20 categories by user popularity. After all, those categories will probably be the most relevant to a user entering on the homepage.

CATEGORY PAGES
I will update the DIV to show only related categories based on what users have found relevant or useful to the current category.
SITE-WIDE FOOTER
Going to remove the original network of links from the footer (approx 20 links). Might possibly include links relevant to the current page being visited.

I'm sure there are tons of other tweaks but I'm guessing the above encompasses the majority of what can potentially be gained from this update.

In the name of patience (well experience really...) I'll wait a week and research this more in case some other good ideas come up.

Thanks everybody for all the feedback. If anyone has any other input I'm all ears :)

[darkyl]

I can confirm what Tedster said: I have 1 site where I removed many links from the main internal link structure (even if that meant building a more deep and hierachical structure) and also removed (or nofollowed) double menus that were put for usability purposes.

The site, that suffered from several problems, like gray bar issues and "-950 like" penalty for several keywords, skyrocketed and it's now ranking incredibly well (position 1 to 5) for basically every keywords and page.

I did this back in december and things started to improve in January and traffic is still growing today, even without any significant additional link building effort.
A 1000% increase in traffic.

So yes, as others said, think carefully about your internal link structure and try to avoid everything that could be misinterpreted by a machine.

Also I don't think the interlinking is giving you any advantage. If I really thought I needed those links for visitors, I would nofollow them all.