Big or small footer? I recently came to this question regarding an oline news website: is it stil a good thing to offer a big footer, with as many links as possible, and a summary of all keywords? The question remains unanswered speaking about SEO: it seems that multiple links in the footer can even be a bad point for Google, and here’s why:

• Search engines seem to devaluate links in the footer.
• Links in the footer are often not the first links on a page to a URL, which means they don’t have so much impact.
• Users rarely scroll down to the links in the footer.
• The more links in a page, the less important each becomes.

I found this article from SEO Moz on footer link optimization very interesting. Randfish also shares examples of good and bad examples. Personnaly, I like Firefox footer:

• It offers a reasonable amount of links and information.
• The design is nice and attractive, though simple.
• I like the social and newsletter features.

Because SEO rules for footer optimization have changed, displaying a footer with thousands links is not worth any longer. The trend is to let go huge and unreadable footers, and work on usable footers. They are not any longer read only by search engines: it is time to think some users might read them.