See on my business directory website:
http://www.penguinpages.co.uk/

There are LOTS of links in the footer, I've added them there mainly for SEO purposes. I want my site to show up in results for searches such as 'Companies in Merseyside' or 'Companies in Cheshire' for example.

However the page looks a little ugly having so many links there, would I benefit just as much from having them on one internal page? Or should I keep them on the homepage?

Yes , It is looking bad . Better you have given some description of links.. Its not good for SEO.

I think they will not help that much with improving your website rankings on Google because first of all they look spammy and hard to find by people, secondly nowadays the types of links that would be beneficial from SEO perspectives are the incoming ones, pointing at your website from other domains and not just loading your pages with internal links.

The second you do anything "for SEO purposes", you have got it wrong!

from my SanSEO plugin on firefox..

Number of links

Number of links represents number of links found on the page. It is generally accepted that search engines consider only a certain number of links on a page and would ignore others for purposes of page rank calculation. SEO Doctor will warn you if your page contains more than 100 links.


You have 200+.
So it probably isnt best,

Makes no difference, you can safely ignore that particular "doctor" as being a quack!

Thanks for the replies, SEO is obviously not my strong point then! Haha.

Sounds like I best just remove them. Although at the very least I need to make sure that each company gets indexed by Google. I've tried the Google XML sitemaps plugin for Wordpress, but it doesn't add any custom posts to the sitemap! At least not yet anyway.

Does anybody have any ideas how I can do that??

Build the site so that USERS are able to find anything and everything, make category maps, link them from the "home page"

Very unreadable and ugly, to be honest

If you really want to put them on the main page, you can hide them in a drop-down menu.

Originally Posted by peterzhou

If you really want to put them on the main page, you can hide them in a drop-down menu.

I'm planning on creating a form on the Directory page that lets users select a company type together with the county, and then view the results.

But I doubt Google would pick that up? Doesn't it just navigate through hyperlinks and not forms?

I have checked that links. These links should be in the footer and they re looking fine there.

Your website looks very nice. If your problem is the interface of your website, its OK now. And its not needed that you remove your links from footer of your home page to internal pages.

Thanks, I've since updated my website so that it doesn't have hundreds of links in the footer

Originally Posted by bestseo

And its not needed that you remove your links from footer of your home page to internal pages.

That's because the links that where a potential problem have now gone.