sitemaps

Will placing a mini-sitemap on every page help?

[hughie]

Hi There

I've written a little script that pulls out all of the pages on my site (about 30) and puts them with links included at the bottom of every page.

They don't get in the way visually but i was wondering if this is going to make any difference to rankings/spider navigation or is it overkill.

Should i just put it at the bottom of the home page only.

Cheers,
Hughie

[mona]

Sounds like a little over kill to me. It won't hurt you, but it might distribute the PR across your site differently.

[growingdigital]

If you were doing this for navigational value, I would say great. However, I don't think it will help SERPs at all.

If you want to gain some SERP value, simply linking to these pages once from your home page is good enough.

Generally speaking, Google and other SE's give a higher ranking to pages linked directly to the home page.

[chrisnrae]

I do this on a lot of my sites simply from a user standpoint, especially if you have to scroll a screen or two to reach the bottom of the page. As a surfer, I like when sites do this as it makes it easier to go wherever I want to next without having to scroll back up. However, I think 30 may be a bit of overkill as far as user navigation is concerned.

"Generally speaking, Google and other SE's give a higher ranking to pages linked directly to the home page."

G treats each page individually. By linking to an internal page only from the homepage, you are only giving that page one inbound link. Link to it from ten of your site pages in addition to your homepage and you're giving it 11. Linking to it only from your homepage isn't going to be more effective than linking to it from your home page and other internal site pages.

[hughie]

Interesting stuff, a nice difference of opinion which is great ;-)

It is still very usable to the user, it's just below the page footer and isn't hidden in any way except font size 1.

I did it purely to get all of this sites pages spidered at the same time, rather than google only spidering the first level of pages and then getting the deeper pages done a bit later. It seems to have worked on that front.

cheers,
hughie

[phantombookman]

I put 4 or 5 links under the 'home' link at the bottom of all my pages.
Each links goes to a main area of the site - I think it is a massive help for people entering the site via an internal page, also helps navigation without continually clicking 'home' etc

It is also great for distributing PR, on one site I have a many of my main pages showing PR5 the same as the index page, which in turn lifts the pages coming of them by a point.

[cabowabo]

I don't see how having thirty links at the bottom of every page could be describes as not hampering the visualness of the site. It would hurt the usability. My recommendation is to have less than ten and focus on each main category of the site, and then branch from there. Breadcrumbs are effective, but if you want spiderability, just put a link to your site map on the home page and you are done. Blah.

Cheers,

CaboWabo

[graywolf]

Doing this will mesh the PR of your site, and if used with optimal anchor text, it can give you that slight edge in the serps. If you arranged the links logically I can't see how it could hurt your usability. Whether it looks spammy or not is in the eye of the beholder.