Internal Links Score way down after removing footer - but links are still available in header?

[SLegierski]

Hello, we recently made a decent amount of changes to our website - one of which included reducing the size of the footer and cutting out the majority of links to sub pages in it. The sub pages are still available to be navigated to in the header, but this has negatively affected our SEO due to a lack of "Internal links". 

Is this our SEO Tool's issue or should we reinstall our footer links? 

Thanks for any advice! 

[GiantFocal]

Hi @SLegierski,

When you mention "negatively affected SEO", are you referring to experiencing ranking drops or simply being tagged as an issue in your SEO tool?

Best regards,

Abraham @ GiantFocal

[SLegierski]

Thanks for the reply @GiantFocal ! Yes, when we removed the extensive footer links our *score* in SE ranking went way down. Is this a non-issue or do you think its actually impacting our SEO score? 

[GiantFocal · Accepted solution]

@SLegierski,

There is no definitive answer to that as SEO tools use their own metrics that don't always align perfectly with how search engines rank sites. The drop in your SERanking score doesn't necessarily mean your actual search engine rankings have been negatively impacted. 

In my experience, a website footer should only include the important pages that visitors and search engines should know and need easy access to. The fewer number of clicks required to access the page, the better.

So, whether we should keep the footer links few or many depends on the website structure, size, and each page's relevancy. 

For examples:

• If a website we're working on has 10 different key products/services, we'll include them all in the footer as long as they're relevant. Less important products/services can be listed on the main Services page. 
• Mandatory pages like privacy policy, terms of use, cookies, GDPR, etc should always be listed in the footer. 
• All essential company information pages, such as about us, team, contact, location, etc., should also be included in the footer.
• Tripwire offers (small-cost offer landing pages) will not be listed in the footer as they are usually linked from the blog posts. They are irrelevant to our main pages.

Hope it helps 🙂

Best regards,

Abraham @ GiantFocal

[SLegierski]

Hey @GiantFocal thank you for the response. Recently I ran the same website audit request with SEMRush and our site recieved an 86/100 vs the 58/100 we were getting from SERanking. 

Thanks, 

Sam