In a webmaster hangout, Google’s John Mueller confirmed that a good website navigation is important if you want to make sure that all of your web pages get indexed correctly:
“Does it matter if the main content area contains lots of links to external sites and few links to [other pages on] the same domain? Does it degrade the quality of that page?
[…] There are two aspects there, on the one hand this is the area of the page where you have your primary content, the content that this page is actually about, not the menu, the sidebar, the footer, the header.
Then that is something that we do take into account and we do try to use those links.
The other thing to keep in mind is that you still need to make sure that within your site you have a clear linking structure. That can happen if you have a clear set up with a side bar, menu.
But if you don’t have a clear linking structure, then we pick up just a bunch of links to external sites, then what might happen is we can’t really crawl the rest of your site properly because we can’t discover it properly.
You can view the video here:
On Twitter, Google’s Zineb Ait confirmed that links in the footer section of a website are not important:
@challierq je laisserai faire l'algo. Les liens sitewide en footer ou en header n'ont pas un tres grand poids en general.
— Zineb Ait (@Missiz_Z) 25. Januar 2016Translation: “Sitewide links in the footer or header of a website do not have much influence.”
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