SEO Blog

There are certain elements of your website that are essential. Legally binding areas such as your Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions sit in your site’s footer. Rarely seen, even less frequently visited.

These have to be there. They ensure that your content is protected and visitors are aware of their rights. Not always an exciting read, but important nonetheless.

The question from Chad Walls though was two-fold, firstly can you actually optimise the privacy policy? Well, in theory you can. You could add links to other parts of your site and add a little strength. But in all honesty, there is very little value in doing so.

It’s unlikely that your privacy page will ever garner any outside links, unless of course you create them yourself. It probably won’t even be visible on search engines for any specific terms. Essentially it is there out of necessity, not as any kind of SEO tool.

This could be an opportunity missed; however, you are better off working on your real money pages. The privacy policy or T&Cs aren’t going to improve sales and they won’t draw in traffic. Your categories and product/services pages on the other hand will. Of course you want to make sure that you have all the necessary information present, so that anybody who does visit it will be able to find what they need easily.

So if you need to add links to help guide people to other resources on your site, do so. But don’t just include them to improve your SEO, the impact is likely to be minimal. Only where you have a small site of just a few pages will you see any real benefit of optimising these legal areas.

The second part of the question relates to duplicate content. Now as you probably know, the vast majority of privacy policies and T&Cs follow a pretty standard format. Legal companies who write these documents tend to keep changes to a minimum, only editing the basic template when absolutely necessary.

This type of mass-replication obviously contravenes content duplication rules. Well, it certainly infringes them at any rate. You shouldn’t receive any kind of site-wide penalty as a consequence of this, although the page itself might struggle to rank – not a major issue.

However, to avoid this kind of issue and any damage that it might cause your site, there is a very simple solution. If you add your privacy policy page to your robots.txt file, this will prevent the search engines from crawling and indexing the page in question.

While of course you won’t have that page appear on any search results, you will avoid any penalties. The page itself still will continue to be visible to visitors and so will perform its fundamental purpose.

Hopefully that’s answered your question Chad, and as always, if you have any SEO queries please feel free to ask.