Summary of things to pay attention to in the footer of a web page

You’ve no doubt seen a lot of sites like this: with 50, 100, or even more links at the bottom. When a search engine crawls your website, it tries to distinguish between different areas of your website and weight them differently. So putting a bunch of links at the bottom of your website isn't going to do you any good. My advice is to keep the number of links at the bottom of your site small: 25.

Dynamic footer

Dynamic content can make it more interesting to search engines. For example, you can include links to your latest articles, add some links to pages where you have recently updated content, or put a few links to popular old articles, a few links to articles you recommend, and so on. Your goal is to tell search engines that your content is constantly changing.

Timestamp and crawling test

Sometimes this helps if you have a large website. This will let you know which parts of your site Google doesn’t like and isn’t crawling as often. If you add the current time in the footer using “search engine-friendly text” such as “page generated on Jan 2011”, then two months later, search for [site:example.com “page generated Jan 2011”]. It will list pages that have not been crawled in 2 months. This isn’t very technical, but it’s a great way to easily spot where you have crawling issues. Here’s a word of caution: don’t use a full date, or Google might tag your page with that date.

No-Follow and Pagerank

I used to be big on no-follow and page authority (PR) transfer, but I no longer think it’s an effective approach. So if you’re using no-follow to block search engines from accessing your contact page, privacy policy, terms of service, etc., stop. This is likely to do more harm than good. If you have some login links, like user accounts, backend pages, then use no-follow. Additionally, you should use robots.txt to block search engines from accessing these pages.

Usability and font size

Although this section does not involve SEO, usability is something you must pay attention to. It is generally better to use a slightly smaller font for the footer than your main text, but not too small. You can use lighter colors behind other colors, but don't make it invisible, otherwise people will think you are trying to cover up something. If you have a lot of content in your footer, group it instead of just throwing it all together.

Ok, let’s review some ways to optimize your footer:

Limit the number of links to only the necessary ones

List some dynamic content

Contains a date used to track search engine crawls

Use no-follow to prevent search engines from crawling pages you don’t want to be crawled, not to control PR delivery.

Organize your footer content into categories.

Use smaller and lighter type, and don't sacrifice usability for appearance.