SEO Talks

Does linking to your privacy/terms pages waste link equity?

No, normal footer links to your privacy and terms pages do not meaningfully waste link equity, and worrying about them is sculpting-myth thinking. These are expected, standard utility links that nearly every site carries, and Google handles boilerplate navigation sensibly rather than treating each footer link as a leak draining value from your important pages. The fear that mandatory utility links are quietly bleeding your rankings is misplaced, the cost, if any exists at all, is negligible and not worth managing.

The worry comes from an outdated mental model in which each link on a page divides a fixed pot of equity, so every link to a low-priority page is imagined to steal from the high-priority ones. That picture was always a simplification, and it has not described reality for a long time. Footer links to privacy, terms, and similar utility pages are exactly the kind of sitewide boilerplate Google has decades of experience interpreting, and observed behavior is that they do not move rankings in the way the sculpting model fears. Chasing this is effort spent fighting a problem that does not show up in practice, which is worth confirming for your own site but has held consistently.

Acting on the myth, meanwhile, creates real downsides. Nofollowing or removing necessary utility links to “save” equity does not concentrate value where you want it, since that saved equity is not redistributed the way the model assumes, and it can hurt users and trust. Privacy and terms links serve legitimate user, legal, and trust purposes, and many users and reviewers expect to find them in the footer. Stripping or crippling them to chase a phantom equity gain trades a real benefit for an imaginary one.

So link to your privacy, terms, and other utility pages normally and stop sculpting them. Keep them in the footer where users expect them, leave them as standard followed links, and spend the attention you would have given this on things that actually move rankings, content depth, genuine internal linking to important pages, and authority. The boilerplate links are doing no harm, treat them as the routine, expected part of a site they are.

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