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
-
Negative SEO yes/no?
We receive links from fake websites, these website are copy's from real websites that link to us, but sometimes the links are changes, as for example one link is called 'tank weapon with hitler', we are a insurance comparison website (a bit of topic). The real websites that link to us are copied and placed on .ga .tk etc domains: For example: wahlrsinnsa.ga, loungihngsa.ga, pajapritosa.cf, rgeitsportsa.cf, sospesvoasa.tk I received spam links on other domains with comments spam etc, this doesnt really work, but in this case we really suffer in our rankings (from position 1 to 5 etc). Not sure if this is negative SEO and if this is really the reason we lost some rankings, but it's a bit of a coincidence the domains come in google webmaster in the same period we suffer a downgrade in our rankings. My question: Is this negative SEO, or is it something automatic. And do I need to disavow the links/domains? The real versions of the websites (on other domains with .nl) give the website autority.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | remkoallertz0 -
How authentic is a dynamic footer from bots' perspective?
I have a very meta level question. Well, I was working on dynamic footer for the website: http://www.askme.com/, you can check the same in the footer. Now, if you refresh this page and check the content, you'll be able to see a different combination of the links in every section. I'm calling it a dynamic footer here, as the values are absolutely dynamic in this case. **Why are we doing this? **For every section in the footer, we have X number of links, but we can show only 25 links in each section. Here, the value of X can be greater than 25 as well (let's say X=50). So, I'm randomizing the list of entries I have for a section and then picking 25 elements from it i.e random 25 elements from the list of entries every time you're refreshing the page. Benefits from SEO perspective? This will help me exposing all the URLs to bots (in multiple crawls) and will add page freshness element as well. **What's the problem, if it is? **I'm wondering how bots will treat this as, at any time bot might see us showing different content to bots and something else to users. Will bot consider this as cloaking (a black hat technique)? Or, bots won't consider it as a black hat technique as I'm refreshing the data every single time, even if its bot who's hitting me consecutively twice to understand what I'm doing.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | _nitman0 -
Removing/ Redirecting bad URL's from main domain
Our users create content for which we host on a seperate URL for a web version. Originally this was hosted on our main domain. This was causing problems because Google was seeing all these different types of content on our main domain. The page content was all over the place and (we think) may have harmed our main domain reputation. About a month ago, we added a robots.txt to block those URL's in that particular folder, so that Google doesn't crawl those pages and ignores it in the SERP. We now went a step further and are now redirecting (301 redirect) all those user created URL's to a totally brand new domain (not affiliated with our brand or main domain). This should have been done from the beginning, but it wasn't. Any suggestions on how can we remove all those original URL's and make Google see them as not affiliated with main domain?? or should we just give it the good ol' time recipe for it to fix itself??
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | redcappi0 -
Will implementing 301's on an existing domain impact massively on rankings?
Hi Guys,I have a new SEO client who only has the non-www domain setup for GWT and I am wondering if implementing a 301 for www will have a massive negative impact on rankings. I know a percentage of link juice and PageRank will be affected. So my question is: If I implement the 301 should I brace myself for a fall in rankings. Should I use a 301 instead to maintain link juice and PageRank? Is it good practice to forward to www? Or could I leave the non www in place and have the www redirect to it to maintain the data? Dave
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | icanseeu0 -
Rankings dropped, should I start a new website?
Hello, my rankings dropped last year (penguin update) - I think it was April 2012 and the website went from 300 visitors per day to 10 per day. This probably happened because I bought links, but I also did a lot of manual and natural SEO (at that time). After the drop, I didn't know what to do... so I did some manual SEO, blog comments, forum posts, article publications (lets say 60 links in total - with diverse anchor texts - brand keywords, etc) and then I paused working on the site to see if there will be any changes... and 1 year latter, there are still no changes. My site used to be in the top results of the first page and now it is totally out of Google. http://getmoreyoutubeviews.com Should I move on and start a new website or do something to fix this one? Thanks Alex
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | buysocialexposure0 -
Site architecture change - +30,000 404's in GWT
So recently we decided to change the URL structure of our online e-commerce catalogue - to make it easier to maintain in the future. But since the change, we have (partially expected) +30K 404's in GWT - when we did the change, I was doing 301 redirects from our Apache server logs but it's just escalated. Should I be concerned of "plugging" these 404's, by either removing them via URL removal tool or carry on doing 301 redirections? It's quite labour intensive - no incoming links to most of these URL's, so is there any point? Thanks, Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Domain Structure For A Network of Websites
To achieve this we need to set up a new architecture of domains and sub-websites to effectively build this network. We want to make sure we follow the right protocols for setting up the domain structures to achieve good SEO for the primary domain and local websites. Today we have our core website at www.doctorsvisioncenter.com which will ultimately will become dvceyecarenetwork.com. That website will serve as the core web presence that can be custom branded for hundreds. For example, today you can go to www.doctorsvisioncenter.com/pinehurst. Note when you start there, you can click around and it is still branded for Pinehurst or spectrum eye care. So the burning question(s). - if I am an independent doc at www.newyorkeye.com, I could do domain forwarding but Google does not index forwarded domains so that is out. I could do a 301 permanent redirect to my page www.doctorsvisioncenter.com/newyorkeye. I could then put a rule in the HT Access file that says if newyorkeye.com redirect to www.doctorsvisioncenter/newyorkeye and then have the domain show up as www.newyorkeye.com. Another way to do that is we point the newyorkeye DNS to doctorsvisioncenter.com rather than a 301 redirect with the same basic rule in the HT Access file. That means that, theoretically, every sub page would show up, for example, as www.newyorkeye.com/contact-lens-center which is actually www.doctorsvisioncenter.com/contact-lens-center. It also means, theoretically, that it will be seen as an individual domain but pointing to all the same content under that individual domain just like potentially hundreds of others. The goal is we build once, manage once and benefit many. If we do something like the above which will mean that each domain will essentially be a separate domain, but, will google see it that way or as duplicative content? While it is easy to answer "yes" it would be duplicative, it is not necessarily the case if the content is on separate domains. Is this a good way to proceed, or does anyone have another recommendation for us?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JessTopps0 -
Does your website get downgraded if you link to a lower quality site?
My site has a pr of 4. My friends site has a pr of 2 but I think that he is doing some black hat seo techniques. I wanted to know whether the search engines would ding me for linking to (i.e., validating) a lower quality site.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jamesjd70