Place blog widget on footer or body of front page

[mgf45]

On my site I get 90% of traffic by reporting real time accident news. It's currently placed on footer as wp widget, which I know is sitewide.

Should I just move the footer widget and place the "latest blog post" on body of home page?


Thanks

[goodroi]

Can Google crawl the widget?
Does the widget add a large amount of content?
How often is the content changing?
Any reason/issue that made you think about moving it?

[mgf45]

Yes google does crawl, I see us ranking for terms just picked up from articles/post. Each post only has around 300 words or so and content changes by the hour.

I was told that having footer links sitewide was a no no and spammy. The post are about auto accidents, I made a bot that scrapes real time data from highway patrol websites and then my writters blog about the accident - we are able to beat out several news outlets. It's helping our law firm rank for keywords like (dallas) car accident attorney. I was just curious to see if moving the widget to front page only in body section would help with rankings.

Thanks

[martinibuster]

Sitewide content is typically ignored. That's how search engines typically handle repeated content, like branding propaganda in the title tag.

Typically, search engines will pick the page with the highest amount of links/PageRank/Mojo and rank that, while suppressing the rest of the pages. The only time search engines do not do that is when the phrase being searched is long tail, then the search engine might return multiple pages from a single site. Otherwise, as I understand it, search engines simply ignore the other pages for ranking purposes.

If you want me to get technical/geeky about it, for duplicate content, Google allocates PageRank to the highest PageRank page in order to suppress the other pages from ranking for that phrase.

[mgf45]

Great thanks for the answer. I think I have two options:

1. Move blog widgets to body of home page, where all of our high quality backlinks go to
2. Or just keep widgets in footer area on front page and disable the footer area stiewide/inner pages

Do you think option 2 is a better option?

[goodroi]

Keep widget in footer. IMHO this is not really a duplicate content situation and should not be treated like a typical situation. Technically you are publishing the same content on multiple pages but since you are updating the content so often googlebot is probably seeing a fresh content version most of the time it crawls a page. You are also likely triggering Google's fresh content filter which is a good thing. Google loves to see your pages updated. You are also adding an organic mix of local search terms without resorting to keyword stuffing to all of your pages which is a good thing. If you move this only to the homepage or block the widget on the inner pages, you will be losing a freshness signal and local search terms on your inner pages which I don't see how that could help you. Worst case Google finds some duplicate content and ignores the duplicate content, best case you have relevant and fresh content on all of your pages.

[mgf45]

thanks for both replies