Putting (WordPress) tags in <footer> tag, good for SEO or not?

Question

I am using tags for my posts on my WordPress site. The content of my post is set in <article> tags, which is fine and now, I want to put the author link and tags in a <footer> tag, but I don't know if this is good for SEO reasons.

I know that Googlebots are putting less weight if they see links in a footer, but will this effect my tag pages? Is there any harm?

I would love to read a good explanation on this.

Answer 1

HTML5 has many benefits and footer being one of those, you can have multiple footers on the page which benefit towards a better semantic page, but in terms of SEO it holds little to no value mind.

You could also adapt your design to take advantage of the 'keywords' props that Schema has to offer, for example:

SOURCE: Using Schema.org for blogging: Article VS BlogPosting

<article itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting">
   <header>
        <h1 itemprop="name"><a rel="bookmark" title="Title Description" href="#">Article Header</a></h1>
        <dl>
            <dt>Publish Date:</dt>
            <dd><time itemprop="datePublished">2013-01-25</time></dd>
            <dt>Authors:</dt>
            <dd><a rel="author" href="#">Author Name</a></dd>
        </dl>
    </header>  

    <div class="blog-container">
        <a title="Title Description" class="th" href="#">
            <img width="870" height="400" itemprop="image" alt="Alt Text here" class="post" src="#">
        </a>
        <p itemprop="description">A long but not to long decription</p>
        <a itemprop="url" title="Title Description" href="#" class="creading">Continue Reading</a>
    </div>

    <footer>
        <dl>
            <dt>Filed Under:</dt> 
            <dd itemprop="keywords"><a rel="category" title="Title Description" href="#">Responsive Design</a></dd>
            <dd itemprop="keywords"> <a rel="category" title="View all posts in Website Design" href="#">Website Design</a></dd>
        </dl>
    </footer>

</article>

Answer 2

Yes, that is a good approach in terms of semantics, and is exactly what the footer is for. Given the tags are related to the article then you would have the footer tag inside it like so:

<article>
  <p>Your article content
  <p>...
  <footer>The tags etc</footer>
</article>

HTML5 Doctor has more information on the footer element.

As for SEO, it wouldn't cause any harm. I've searched around and found nothing but speculation and guesses saying "Google could potentially reduce the ranking weight of the footer tag". But there is no evidence. (Even if Google were to do that, the result would be pretty small.)

Answer 3

Surely the purpose of this would be to aid crawlability to your most popular post tags and ease of use for visitors to explore these categories?

There is no "SEO" value in listing your tags in your footer and minimal link weight will be passed via these links to your tag pages - this, subsequently have no minimal effect on the performance of these pages in search (positive or otherwise).

Whilst there would not be any direct ranking influence, there are many 'knock-on' effects with rankings such as the easier pages of your site can be found that serve great value to your visitors that they engage well with (as an example).

Edit: The original question has been edited since I posted my answer making my answer sound pretty irrelevant to the question or more-so, the question was pretty unclear in the first place.