The mega-footer internal-link dump

The mega-footer internal-link dump

"Link to every important page from the footer so they all get equity."

That's not how distribution works.

Sitewide footer links appear on every page, which sounds powerful and is actually the opposite. A link that exists everywhere carries almost no discriminating signal — Google has long discounted boilerplate footer/sidebar links precisely because they're not editorial choices about this page.

Here's the failure mode: people see 'orphan page' in a crawler, add it to the footer, mark it solved. The page is now technically linked and still functionally orphaned — no contextual relevance, no in-content link telling anything what it's about. Crawlable, not understood.

Fix: the strongest internal links are in-body, editorial, and contextually surrounded by relevant text. Use the footer for genuine site-wide utility (contact, privacy), and link your money pages from within content on topically related pages. A relevant in-content link beats fifty footer slots.