Unpopular opinion: a 40-link mega-footer on a 500-page site means each of those footer URLs gets a sitewide vote — diluting the PageRank that should concentrate on a handful of money pages.
Footers got devalued as a signal precisely because everyone stuffed them. Boilerplate links repeated on every page carry near-zero anchor weight, but they still split the page's outgoing flow.
Keep footers to legal, trust, and 3-4 genuine priority links. Everything else belongs in contextual placement where intent exists.
How many links are in your footer right now? Go count. I dare you.
Link Equity Heat
@LinkEquityHeat
Every link in your footer is stealing equity from the pages that deserve it.
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