I was updating my own footer today for Real Estate Webmasters and it occurred to me that I should validate my assumption that Google does in fact treat footer links (internally) as valuable.
The reason I wanted to check was that we know that Google looks at “external links” in the footer as potentially spammy, or at least devalues them.
I found a great article on Search Engine Journal where they quoted Google’s John Mueller as saying the following:
Good enough for me! (John is Google’s public face for answering SEO questions)
So… time for me to update those links!
Note John does go on to say that the “content” in those links (or in footers) is treated differently as it’s further down the page (so likely considered less of a priority)
One of the things I’m trying not to do (will take some time to build out more pages) is just replicate links in the top nav in the bottom (That is a waste, they don’t count twice)
So I’m trying to deep link at least 1 level down for my most important pillar pages.