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Just like the title says, what are the effects of having a "Contact us" and a "Privacy policy" on your site?

I've read that it could build up your trust with Google, is this true? I've also read that some people said that you should add a noindex tag to your "Privacy policy" page, would this be a good idea? I say this because many websites have similar privacy policies, and I don't want any duplicate content issues. (For example, many people could be using the same WordPress privacy policy generator). I'm wondering the same things for the "Contact us" page as well.

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    Still overthinking things. Almost every website has these and they don't have any problems because of it.
    – John Conde ♦
    Commented Aug 1, 2013 at 12:49
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    Using noindex on any internal page is so oldschool, I'd advise you stop reading to much on SEO, or at least articles that are over a year old. Using noindex on internal pages is just asking for trouble.
    – Simon Hayter
    Commented Aug 1, 2013 at 13:29
  • @JohnConde Ahh thank you! So what about linking? Would it be safe to link to these pages from the footer (so it would be linked from every page on the site). I don't want to have any issues with that link juice crap I read about.
    – Gkhan14
    Commented Aug 1, 2013 at 13:39
  • That would be prefectly fine. :)
    – John Conde ♦
    Commented Aug 1, 2013 at 13:41
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    @bybe, why is using noindex asking for trouble? I don't want to get into a debate, but this is poor advice you are giving. There are plenty of valid times when you can use noindex on your pages.
    – Max
    Commented Aug 1, 2013 at 15:30

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Google just recently released a video on this exact subject:

How does duplicate copy that's legally required (ie Terms & Conditions across multiple offers) affect performance in search?

So the answer from the horses mouth is I wouldn't stress about that.

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You should have a privacy policy and a "contact us" page.

  • It's unclear if Google specifically boosts sites with these type of pages, but I find it plausible that they do.
  • Users trust a site more if these pages exist. Especially the contact page.
  • Even if Google doesn't specifically have an algorithmic factor for these pages, they certainly pay attention to how happy users are with a site.
  • A privacy policy is required (by Google) if you are running AdSense on your site.

You should not noindex these pages.

  • They won't cause duplicate content issues. So many sites have these pages that Google knows how to deal with this duplicated content without penalizing any sites.
  • Users sometimes search for "contact <mybrand>", it makes sense for users to be able to find the correct page for this.
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You're right. By simplicity, many webmasters use generator to generate privacy policy webpage and it leads to duplicate content issues. Moreover, for "Contact us" webpage in general, there is no big content and just a contact form.

For your "Privacy policy" webpage, I recommend to write your own text (see a specialized lawyer to help you). And for your "Contact us" webpage, you can add some personal text (before the form for example) to give more SEO weight on this webpage.

With these good practices, you won't have any problem about duplicate content. However, don't use <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> on these webpages; just avoid duplicate content.

About linking, these two webpages can be available from all webpages of your site. Thus putting links on footer is a good practice. You're going to give link juice to these webpages and it's normal because there are two important webpages (that's why be careful of text on them is important).

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  • Ahh thank you! So what about linking? Would it be safe to link to these pages from the footer (so it would be linked from every page on the site). I don't want to have any issues with that link juice crap I read about.
    – Gkhan14
    Commented Aug 1, 2013 at 13:38
  • I have edited my answer.
    – Zistoloen
    Commented Aug 1, 2013 at 13:44
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I've read that it could build up your trust with Google, is this true?

Yes, that is true. This pages show Google you are ready to hear your visitors and that you have rules of your activity.

I've also read that some people said that you should add a noindex tag to your "Privacy policy" page, would this be a good idea? I say this because many websites have similar privacy policies, and I don't want any duplicate content issues.

If in short, this is not necessarily. See this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi-wkEeOKxM

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Yes these pages effects SEO, Privacy policy and disclaimer or terms of use pages are very necessary for better SEO.

Google is continually searching for the trusted sites & if you have these pages then your site will be loved by the search engine bots and so will be better indexed & improve position in SERP. Add these pages at the footer, don't forget to add a sitemap page too.

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Please Add privacy policy to your website. It will increase your ranking. Don't take advice from people who are able to rank in the top ten pages on difficulty keywords as well, and also don't trust 100% of what Google says for truth.

They earn billions on ad space. So, why would they give away the algorithm? Also, comments pertaining to overthinking means you're going the right direction and leaving your competitors in the dust! Keep going this direction, and never look back. Anyone commenting otherwise is simply using this blog as a means to build link juice back to their profile account.

Why, you may ask? Because they understand that sending a URL with the word SEO in it to their account, and that juice sends to their website. You are starting to see how the comments with no insights are left in the billions on websites such as this and others! This is another form of affecting your SEO too.

Always consider the grain of salt being people understand these types of chats exist, they surf for it and put misinformation to cause the community to build bad SEO strategies or poorly based opinions with zero data to back it up.

Building trust with users, and Google, both play into your google analytics bounce rate and other things like session count.

Not only does it help your google rank across every URL, but it also increases your domain authority not only with scores - but also with humans too.

Also, ranking a key phrase of 'Your company name+Privacy+Policy' would increase the pages you're indexing, which increases your rank - Google also pointed out this Katamari effect of ranking more and more pages pick up more and more keywords and guess what - that ranking across all those keywords will increase.

Now - this isn't to say - go spam out a bunch of content on your website. That's what News companies do and this spreads their URL rating out from an 'internet parent/child' or category perspective. You can do that, it works for some companies, like Wikipedia.

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  • I edited out the link from this post. I'm suspicious that created your account and posted this just to include the link. Posting self-promotion links here can be OK if done occasionally with enough reputation in relevant places, however, new users need to gain reputation before doing that.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Aug 8, 2017 at 14:51
  • This answer would be much better if it provided something to back up your assertions. For example you could find case studies that showed that adding a privacy policy was good for rankings. Most of what I've read on this subject indicates that the benefits of a privacy policy are no where near as great as your answer suggests.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Aug 8, 2017 at 14:53
  • Understandable. I'll work my way up. There's a lot of garbage here - but if you want to call my content the worst of it. I understand 100%. Let's clean up this website mate. Please link me to any guidelines I can learn from. If you prefer I use my actual domain, I had that originally but edited to blogger to ensure people making these clicks can go and read the content as real content. I attempted pasting more links to the research that is available online - but I have a new account, and went for the best bang for the buck. Thanks again!
    – dev3lop.com
    Commented Aug 8, 2017 at 16:55
  • @StephenOstermiller i do request you type what anyone is going to type to find an easy Privacy Policy template. And how many hundreds of thousands of backlinks are spammed to these 'template generators' -- where my link was an 'explanatory of privacy policy' and my personal privacy policy - to show it's not BS spam. By removing that link, you're pushing users at stack exchange towards researching it on their own, and as you know what you're speaking about - you know they are going to Google something that is actively SEO spammed. This is where I sort of get frustrated with the funneling mate.
    – dev3lop.com
    Commented Aug 8, 2017 at 17:14
  • Smells like SEO funnel generators cover these searches in the webmaster area, and I think the authority figures keep the only helpful niches pushed down with fake accounts and relentless time consumption in forums to merely spread misinformation, that's why the more I scroll through the more I see a bunch of the same groups of people hammering out fake SEO content, no different than spamming affiliate funnels instead of helpful seo to the top page, your responses aren't no different than the others. Opinions on opinions. I'll kick back sit in real data, you keep spread misinformation enjoy 😊
    – dev3lop.com
    Commented Oct 14, 2017 at 13:32

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