Perhaps we want to rethink placing pages we want to rank in the footer.
A client recently launched a 5 page mini site which still has no links pointing to it (this will change very soon). Google has indexed the 3 pages linked to in the top navigation, but none of the other pages that are linked to from the footer. Yahoo has indexed no pages and MSN has indexed both the www and non-www versions of all pages due to 301’s not being properly set at launch.
This says to me that all things being equal, Google either:
- Places no weight on links in what it deems to be ‘the footer’ or a section of the site that exhibits similar qualities.
- Places significantly less weight on links in the footer relative to links from primary nav.
I’d still like to test links from within content to see how they impact which pages get indexed, but these findings were interesting nonetheless. Anybody else notice anything similar?