Footer Links - Trying to preserve page link juice

[Broadway]

I have a subdirectory composed of about 50 webpages illustrating different widget variations.

Each page is totally unique and contains a fair amount of text (these are not duplicate or thin pages).

In the text of these pages there are very on-target links to other pages outside of this subdirectory (say, 4 per page).

More or less as "footer" linking on each of these pages, there is a standardized index that links to all of the 50 pages in this subdirectory.

To me it would seem that the 50 footer links dilute the link juice flowing out to the 4 pages linked to in the page text.(in the sense that each page contains 54 links)

As part of a page redesigned, I have put the 50 footer links in an iframe. The thinking being that now each page only has 5 outbound links (the 4 in-text and the one iframe).

I'm curious if this is a valid or effective way of preserving link juice. I not sure what the current thought on this topic is.

The iframe does increase the page load time, so I don't want to use it unless it helps my situation.


By doing this, have I divorced the 50 footer links from each page?

Do I need to "noindex" the page called by the iframe (that contains the 50 links)?

Possibly since the 50 footer links take a standardized format, Google was pretty much devaluing them anyway
and splitting them off into an iframe isn't necessary?

Thanks.

[tedster]

It's not clear exactly how much Google devalued or dampened footer links - or what that "reasonable surfer" mechanism looks like in detail. Right now, content in an iframe is no longer "connected" to the scoring of the page that holds it, although Matt Cutts did mention a little while ago that this also might change in the future.

So as far as I can tell, your iframe solution would return more link equity to the links that remain on the page. It would also remove all those anchor text keywords from entering into the scoring of that page.

In the past, an iframe src attribute was not considered a "link". But even if that does change, it would only be one link, and not a gusher. And whatever link equity is accumulated by the iframed URL will help circulation throughout your site. So a robots meta noindex,follow could make sense, if that list of links makes a poor landing page.

FWIW, in my testing if an iframe source page did not have a straight href link somewhere on the web, then it wasn't indexed. When I did want it indexed, I needed to create a regular html anchor element that pointed to it. The src attribute alone didn't do it.

[Broadway]

Thank you.