Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is it negative to put a backlink into the footer's website of our clients ?
-
Hello there !
Everything is in the subject of this post but here is the context : we are a web agency and we, among others, build websites for our clients (most of them are shops). Until now, we put a link in their footer, like "developped by MyWebShop".
But we don't know if it is bad or not. With only one website we can have like hundred of backlinks at once, but is it good for SEO or not ? Will Google penalize us thinking that is blackhat practices ? Is it better to put our link in the "legal notices" or "disclaimer" part of the websites ?
What is the best practice for a lasting SEO ?
I hope you understand my question,
Thnak you in advance !
-
I asked a similar question to this here http://www.seomoz.org/q/site-wide-footer-links-or-single-website-credits-page and it has possibly useful answers. I'd be interested to hear your views on whether to: A) create site-wide footer links on all pages of my client sites (varying anchor) B) just create a "Website Credits" page and include this inthe sitemap C) create site wide footer links to the website credits page, and link from this back to my site I look forward to hearing your views...
-
I'm actually not sure I agree. From a theoretical, PageRank-passing perspective, sitewide links are better. From a penalty/risk perspective, 1000s of sitewide links can lead to a ton of links coming from very few unique domains, which can start to look suspicious. I actually think you might see less devaluation by limiting the footer links to a couple of strong pages on each client site.
-
Practically, I think Julie is right, but I have seen heavy devaluation of these footer links in the past year or two. They'll still count for something, but not a lot. The only warning I'd add is that I wouldn't create a situation where these are your ONLY links. You could risk looking like a link farm and even a potential penalty at that point. These easy links should be only one part of your link-building strategy.
I'd also highly encourage diversity. Mix up the anchor text, as long as it's relevant, and maybe even put the link different places. If you can get contextual links somehow (not footers or sidebars), that's a huge plus. The more you can mix it up, the better.
-
From a pure SEO perspective, it's better to have the link in the footer appearing on each page.
-
Speaking personally I'm not in favor of it but more from an appearance perspective. I've seen a lot of cases where this is abused by smaller operations who aren't taking their customer's overall outbound link profiles into account. We've inherited projects where the previous designer put about 100 words into the META author tag spamming his keywords, and then in addition put at least a paragraph of ALT text on his footer link. The client didn't even know it was there, or what it necessarily meant.
I also think it detracts from the appearance/professionalism of larger clients sites. I think personally I'm moving towards either very subtle and small center-footer links, with the full knowledge of the client, or a paragraph and link on the About US/Partners page. Note this is my opinion on what we're doing and not meant as an indictment of anyone else's practices.
-
Thanks for your "enlightenment"
I wonder if it wouldn't be better (on the pure seo perspective) to only put a link on the credit page for exemple ?
-
This is standard practice of almost all web design agencies. Giant blog platforms like Wordpress and Blogger also put in a credit link by default. The presence of a credit link like you described the footer will not hurt you in any way.
There is some debate about whether or not it will help you at all (I think it will -- footer links are greatly discounted, but still seem to count for something) but it won't hurt, and it makes sense from a branding/advertising perspective.
-
I know with Panda 3.3 update this past week, there has been some change to the way Google interprets back links. So, I'll be curious what the opinions of other people would be. Personally, I wouldn't put a link in the footer of client sites........just my opinion.....
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My Brand new website shows 79% spam Score, what is the reason and how should I deal with this?
Hi, I have just launched my website 1 month before and I have used all paid images, Uniquely written contents, Everything is genuine for better SEO experience in the future. The actual problem is its showing spam by 79% in MOZ bar, I don't have a single link on my website also my content is unique, Images are unique. Why its showing so much spam on this brand new website? Can you please help me? I am very stressed due to this problem.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rahat640 -
Backlink Indexing - will this technique hurt or help?
So I came across this idea on YouTube: Indexing your backlinks. I understand its not enough to just have google crawl your pages - you want them indexed. So, if you create backlinks on say a blog or social profile, will it benefit you to have them submitted to other popular blogs, news / pr sites, video channels - of which may be unrelated - for the sole purpose of getting them not just crawled but indexed? There are SEO companies that I have seen that claim they do exactly that (publish your backlinks all over the web - making backlinks for backlinks) but in reality is this a good thing or a bad thing? Could this help rankings or hurt them?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | momentum_technology_services0 -
Site Footer Links Used for Keyword Spam
I was on the phone with a proposed web relaunch firm for one of my clients listening to them talk about their deep SEO knowledge. I cannot believe that this wouldn’t be considered black-hat or at least very Spammy in which case a client could be in trouble. On this vendor’s site I notice that they stack the footer site map with about 50 links that are basically keywords they are trying to rank for. But here’s the kicker shown by way of example from one of the themes in the footer: 9 footer links:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RosemaryB
Top PR Firms
Best PR Firms
Leading PR Firms
CyberSecurity PR Firms
Cyber Security PR Firms
Technology PR Firms
PR Firm
Government PR Firms
Public Sector PR Firms Each link goes to a unique URL that is basically a knock-off of the homepage with a few words or at the most one sentences swapped out to include this footer link keyword phrase, sometimes there is a different title attribute but generally they are a close match to each other. The canonical for each page links back to itself. I simply can’t believe Google doesn’t consider this Spammy. Interested in your view.
Rosemary0 -
Excluding Googlebot From AB Test - Acceptable Sample Size To Negate Cloaking Risk?
My company uses a proprietary AB testing platform. We are testing out an entirely new experience on our product pages, but it is not optimized for SEO. The testing framework will not show the challenger recipe to search bots. With that being said, to avoid any risks of cloaking, what is an acceptable sample size (or percentage) of traffic to funnel into this test?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edmundsseo0 -
Why website isn't showing on results?
Hello Moz! Just got a quick question - we have a clientcalled and for some reason they just aren't showing up in the search results. It's not a new domain and hasn't been penalised (or has reason for penalty). All the content is fresh and has no bad back links to the site. It is a new website and has been indexed by Google but for even for branded search terms, it just doesn't show up anywhere on page 1 (i think page 4). Any help or advise is great appreciated is it's doing my head in. We are using www.google.com.au. Kindest Regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kymodo0 -
Cross linking websites of the same company, is it a good idea
As a user I think it is beneficial because those websites are segmented to answer to each customer needs, so I wonder if I should continue to do it or avoid it as much as possible if it damages rankings...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mcany0 -
Why do websites use different URLS for mobile and desktop
Although Google and Bing have recommended that the same URL be used for serving desktop and mobile websites, portals like airbnb are using different URLS to serve mobile and web users. Does anyone know why this is being done even though it is not GOOD for SEO?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | razasaeed0 -
Do shady backlinks actually damage ranking?
That is, it looks like a whole bunch of sites got smacked around the penguin/panda updates, but is this by virtue of actually being hurt by google's algorithms, or by virtue of simply not being helped "as much"? That is, was it a matter of the sites just not having any 'quality' backlinks, having relied on things google no longer liked, which would result in not having as much to push them to the top? That is, they would have been in the same position had they not had those shoddy practices? Or was google actively punishing those sites? That is, are they worse off for having those shoddy practices? I guess the reason I ask is I'm somewhat terrified of going "out there" to get backlinks -- worst case scenario: would it just not do much to help, or would it actually hurt? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | yoni450