: Do the "Contact us" and "Privacy policy" pages affect SEO? 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

@Tiffany637

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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@Gail5422790

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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@Sherry384

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

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@BetL925

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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@Megan663

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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@Bryan171

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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