Sidewide links in Site's Sidebar - Are they considered spam?

[austinwells]

Hello All,

I have a question regarding Side Wide links on website's sidebar links to different pages of same sites. Does they consider as spam links? If so can what is the other way to keep your website inner page links on your website. If you don't keep them in your sidebar, where you can place them? As we all know sidebar is the place from where you get maximum exposure of your visitors, if you place those related page links in your FOOTER Part OR in TOP navigation it wont give you that much effect.

If such side wide links may consider as spam, can we make them NoFollow? Does this is a solution for side wide links?

In TOP NAVIGATION you will find links to different sections. On each section, in left side top you will find navigation for pages which are related to that section. Does these links harm my site's ranking according to panda?

Your replies appreciated....

[edited by: tedster at 1:53 pm (utc) on Jun 27, 2012]

[tedster]

What you describe sounds like second-level navigation. Is it true that Inside each section on the main menu, the "sidebar" links are always the same?

This set-up should not be a problem on its own. In fact, it sounds like what is called "inverted L navigation" - something I still have on several sites that have no Panda/Penguin problems.

what can be a problem is if you keyword stuff those sidebar links. If you include links to other parts of the site just to boost PR instead of to help your visitors find what they need, that can make problems, too.

[Thaparian]

If you have a wordpress site about widgets, and in sidebar there are sitewide category links like "topic1 widgets", "topic2 widgets", "topic3 widgets"...say around 40 links.

The category pages have the same text in h1 tags and in title.

Is this spamming? Should one change the links to "topic1", "topic2" "topic3"?

Same keywords in h1 tags, title, url, inner site link...Over optimization penalty?

[tedster]

Yes, using the same keyword over and over in your internal links can also cause troubles.

[themaninthejar]

Should one change the links to "topic1", "topic2" "topic3"?

I have done this wherever possible. It looks better, makes navigation easier and reduces the overall keyword density of the site.

[austinwells]

Hello tedster,

Thanks for your reply, you mean to say that sidewide links will not affect site if you kept them in a way that does not look like keyword spam?

Well in my case I have linked all the pages through their concept name for each section. So though I dont want to do spam it looks like a sam? Please advice best solution in this situation.

E.G. I have a site related to Car Loan....and the pages i have on my sites are :
1) used car loan
2) No Cosigner car loan
3) car loan with bad credit
4) poor credit car loan
5) low interest car loan

These are the proper names only in order to link those keyowrds maintaining relevancy, But unfortunately these all are the main keyowrds for the pages. If try to make it less spammy anyhow, and reduce the density than also it will not servce the purpose.

E.g. If I change "Cars for Bad Credit People" instead of the 3rd page name i.e. Car loan with bad credit. In this case it will not look attractive / useful to my visitors.