I have a few small sites, some are doing better with SEO, some not so great. On the index pages of a couple of our sites, towards the bottom of the page, we have a section with about 35-40 links to different parts of our site and our other sites. It's not so ugly or out of place where it offends visitors - the links are relevant.

Of course, this "navigation section" is loaded with links that have our most targeting anchor text in the links. We thought by putting this on some of our better performing pages, we could get some good link juice over to some of our other pages.

Is this recommended, will it help, or will we likely get a mark against us from google, yahoo, and the other SEs? Thanks for any suggestions. Here's and example (without the hyperlinks):

gadget one best gadget quality gadgets famous gadgets
most trusted gadgets find gadgets free gadget guide
top gadgets what are gadgets searching for gadgets

Generally footer links are frowned up on an devalued by Google now, and if you are filling them with keyowrds then they look even more spammy. I would personally get them the hell out of there. If they are navigation, then put them with navigation.

Footer is not really great trying to get good link juice. There are better ways to get good link juice. Quite easy now to build backlinks with your keyword in others' blog relevant to your site.

thefandango - thanks for the reply. The links aren't actually in the footer, more in the middle of the page. But I see what you are saying about being penalized by serps for this type of thing, regardless of where they are on the page.

I've seen recommendations by SEO experts that having a few links with great anchor text on your high ranking pages, links that lead to other parts of your site which you want to have indexed better, can be beneficial.

For example, if my home page has a pr 3 and I want to give another page on my site some link juice (a page that has little rank), I would create a link with the best anchor text on the home page to direct juice to that other page.

Do you have a recommended number of links on a page (homepage, etc) that should contain keyword loaded anchor text?

MaximZF - thanks for the suggestion. I agree with you 100%. In my question here though, I was referring more to the internal linking strategy of my sites, or the linking strategy between two sites that I own. Please let me know if you have any suggestions regarding this.

If you want to use footer links DO SO!!.

The people who have postulated these wondrous ideas of what gets "penalised" are always looking for an excuse why their tricks and spammy tactics fail.

They don't fail because they are "footer links" their efforts failed because the "testers" probably had 500 1 pixel font links to various sites/pages (usually their own dodgy diet pill sites), but of course it's not what, but where that must bethe problem.

I've had two or three sites that have had the entire navigation in the footer because that is what worked best for the particular site, never had any kind of problem with crawling or getting SE traffic.

Ignore the majority of these "theories" test it for yourself or look around at sites that do have these "dangerous" features. Apply logic and common sense not fairy dust or "black magic".

chrishirst - thanks for insights. All of my links are standard size, there's just about 40 of them. I was just trying to make sure I wasn't doing something that would hurt my status with the SE, because I've heard there are some things will get you penalized.

I do not think Google penalizes for putting links in the footer, but you have to be careful and you cannot put too many links in the footer.

Personally, I put the menus and submenus under the main navigation and then just put the main menu options in the footer.

I then put the odd link with anchor text within the content to important pages within the site - I've read somewhere that this could help to tell the search engines which pages within the site you consider most important for certain keywords.

Definitely frowned upon by Google's index bots, I would say don't even risk it. It's easier to just get links to naturally build up over time instead of trying to rush things.

@andrew99 - take my advice and read and learn from what chrishirst says

My take - if you want footer links than have them it's a perfectly normal thing to do. One thing to ask yourself, will those links be useful for your visitors?

Footer link are not bad if they will be low in numbers like say about 5-7 links.