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
-
High Rank and Traffic of low DA and Backlinks
Hi guys, is a pleasure being a part of this community, hope in learning a lot with you guys, i just started a year learning about SEO and it been a big journey. I was looking at some competition of some websites that i been optmizing, and i found a website that called my attention and i cant figure out whats going on, it haves huge traffic but in terms of technicall SEO is really week, and not just this but also in terms of DA and backlinks (most of them spammy - 20 backlinks), the domain in question is bhnews.com.br I notice that doesnt have any social media, not analytics, etc. The only thing that i notice is that there is a website or a company called "BH news" (televesion), but its not related with it, since the type of information that bhnews.com.br presents is "lottery" results. So this kind of situation confuses me a lot, because is a lot of hard work in optmizing a website to rank in google, and than i come a across with this type of website with 20 backlinks (most of anchor or name of domain), and than haves like 2M visits per month and ranks for keywords related with the this type of sites of lottery. Can someone tell me if there is some kind of black seo, or something that is making this rank so high? regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jogobicho0 -
Malicious backlinks
Hello to everyone! We have identified some weird links that are pointing to our site and we are not sure if they are considered malicious backlinks and we should disavow them. Most of them are directories of websites, the most common one is called "Top million domains by alexa" (you can see an example here: www.besafe.in/domain-list-237). Have you ever seen these kind of links before? Are they causing harm to our site? Thank you so much!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xaviplabor0 -
SSL Importance For Backlinks
I am trying to build some good quality backlinks, how important is SSL for the site that we post guest blogs on? I realize that if a site does not have SSL currently, their DA will likely not go up very fast because of Google's new algorithms, but currently, I am looking at a couple sites with a DA of 40 and 41. By the way, my site has SSL (is https). Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CSBarns0 -
Should I delete Meta Keywords from a website?
Hi Guys, I've been reading various posts on the Q&A section here at Moz about Meta keywords. I understand that meta keywords are not relevant with Google and that Bing signals this as spam. I'm optimising existing websites which already have meta keywords in the html coding. My question is: If I delete ALL meta keyword coding will this have any negative impact whatsoever? Thanks Mozers Jason 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Grant-Westfield0 -
Footer Link in International Parent Company Websites Causing Penalty?
Still waiting to look at the analytics for the timeframe, but we do know that the top keyword dropped on or about April 23, 2012 from the #1 ranking in Google - something they had held for years, and traffic dropped over 15% that month and further slips since. Just looked at Google Webmaster Tools and see over 2.3MM backlinks from "sister" compainies from their footers. One has over 700,000, the rest about 50,000 on average and all going to the home page, and all using the same anchor text, which is both a branded keyword, as well as a generic keyword, the same one they ranked #1 for. They are all "nofollows" but we are trying to confirm if the nofollow was before or after they got hit, but regardless, Google has found them. To also add, most of sites are from their international sites, so .de, .pl, .es, .nl and other Eurpean country extensions. Of course based on this, I would assume the footer links and timing, was result of the Penguin update and spam. The one issue, is that the other US "sister" companies listed in the same footer, did not see a drop, in fact some had increase traffic. And one of them has the same issue with the brand name, where it is both a brand name and a generic keyword. The only note that I will make about any of the other domains is that they do not drive the traffic this one used to. There is at least a 100,000+ visitor difference among the main site, and this additional sister sites also listed in the footer. I think I'm on the right track with the footer links, even though the other sites that have the same footer links do not seem to be suffering as much, but wanted to see if anyone else had a different opinion or theory. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LeverSEO
Jen Davis0 -
Backlinks for the same IP address
Hi Everyone I've been doing a backlink clean up as my site has dropped quite a lot in the search engine results over the last 4 months. While doing the backlink clean up I cam e across 20 different domains all based in the Washington/ VA area all with the same IP address. To make matters worse the contents and link to my site are all duplicated. Is this seen as bad practice from Google's perspective i.e. a link network.?? I look forward to hearing you comments Many thanks Jonathan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JonnytheB0 -
Are expired domains for Godaddy backlinks already reset by googel ?
When does Google actual reset backlinks to a domain. If i am buying expired domains from godaddy action for linking purpose am i wasting my time.Also if that the case whats the point of buying expired domains with many links pointing to them. If the backlinks to the expired domain still show up under my Google webmaster tool window does that mean Google counts that link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ryguy870 -
Will Google Penalize Content put in a Div with a Scrollbar?
I noticed Moosejaw was adding quite a bit of content to the bottom of category pages via a div tag that makes use of a scroll bar. Could a site be penalized by Google for this technique? Example: http://www.moosejaw.com/moosejaw/shop/search_Patagonia-Clothing____
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BrandLabs0