950 penalty question

[speedshopping]

Hi everyone,

Our website went into 950 status early hours 11th Dec across multiple subdomains - after plenty of hours reading the causes / triggers I wanted to ask you about our footer links specifically.

Basically we have a set of 26 A-Z links at the bottom of every page. These pages aren't for ranking, they are sitemap pages that help Google crawl to our important pages quicker.

They look like this:

A | B | C | D | E | F | etc...

Would these links look suspicious to Google, and could it contribute to triggering a 950? Should we be linking to one sitemap page which then has these A-Z links on it?

Cheers,
Speedshopping

[speedshopping]

Obviously I am not saying this area would be the main reason for going 950, but to see if it would contribute to an overall trip if the algorithm

[SevenCubed]

I think the lack of response isn't out of lack-of-want to help you but more in line with these days most members really don't know what's going on with google. Rather than give you misleading info to possibly make matters worst we just prefer not to make a guess that we cannot backup with concrete evidence.

[bwnbwn]

speed how many links are you talking in the footer?
The footer of your page is not the place for a sitemap never has been. Your given many ways to add a site map for the bot.
Remeber build for the user not the bot, can you tell me what good this does for me as a user on your site. If you don't have a good answer then yes take them out and place them were they need to be a sitemap.

[speedshopping]

26 footer links that are specifically there on over half a million pages to help the search engines get to our pages - totally agree they're not for users, but would they contribute to a 950? The links are not keyword rich so don't follow the idea of an over optimisation of exact anchor text triggering the penalty

[netmeg]

In my opinion, if they're not there for users, then get rid of them.

[conroy]

In my opinion it's probably not causing the penalty unless they are overoptimized, for example:

Blue Widget A | Blue Widget B | Blue Widget C

950 seems to be overoptimization on page and in backlinks.

[speedshopping]

most of the reading suggests that the biggest contributor to a 950 is anchor text on internal links - like I said, our footer links are simply labelled "A", "B" etc...

The statement about "not for users" seems to hold water here.

[jimbeetle]

There are many, many examples of sites that used thick footers (and headers) that are not penalized so that in itself would not be a reason for a penalty.